The scrubby forests of southern Georgia, dotting a landscape of low hills and swampy bottoms, are not what many people would consider to be exalted country, the sort of place to inspire lyrical considerations of nature and culture. Yet that is just what essayist Janisse Ray delivers in her memorable debut, a memoir of life in a part of America that roads and towns have passed by, a land settled by hardscrabble Scots herders who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, and who bear the derogatory epithet "cracker" with quiet pride.

Ray grew up in a junkyard outside what had been longleaf pine forest, an ecosystem that has nearly disappeared in the American South through excessive logging. Her family had little money, but that was not important; they more than made up for material want through unabashed love and a passion for learning, values that underlie every turn of Ray's narrative. She finds beauty in weeds and puddles, celebrates the ways of tortoises and woodpeckers, and argues powerfully for the virtues of establishing a connection with one's native ground.

"I carry the landscape inside like an ache," Ray writes. Her evocations of fog-enshrouded woods and old ways of living are not without pain for all that has been lost--but full of hope as well for what can be saved. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
Ray, a poet and an environmental activist, takes a tough-minded look at life in rural southern Georgia in this blend of memoir and nature study. She presents detailed observations of her family members, most notably her grandfather Charlie, who was "terrifying, prone to violent and unmerited punishment"; her father, whose decision to buy a tract of land near Highway 1 and turn it into what became a massive junkyard with a house in the middle set in motion the key events in Ray's life; and her mother, whose total devotion to her family was tested when her husband began a three-year bout with mental illness. Interspersed with these portraits are various chapters describing the beauty of the longleaf pine flatwoods and other natural treasures found, and often endangered, in her home state. Ray's writing is at its best when she recalls her most harrowing memories, such as when her father gave her and her two brothers a whipping after they stood by and watched a friend kill a turtle. These scenes resonate during the interpolated naturalist chapters, which evoke the calm of the landscape and give readers a respite from the anger and pain that drive much of the family narrative. In a final chapter (in which she includes appendixes on the specific endangered species of the South), Ray laments the "daily erosion of unique folkways as our native ecosystems and all their inhabitants disappear." What remains most memorable are the sections where Ray describes, and attempts to prevent, her own disconnection from the Georgia landscape. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
If this book is social history, why does it also read like natural history? Seemingly, that's the point Ray, a naturalist and environmental activist, hopes to make: that she is a product of her environment and therefore tied to it. Through alternating chapters, the author presents a biography of herself and her family and discussion of the longleaf pine tree community of the South (mainly Florida and Georgia). The family stories reveal poverty, strict parental and religious prohibitions, tough discipline, and a family history of mental illness. Writing these stories seems to have been cathartic for Ray, helping her understand why family members acted and believed as they did. Her natural history chapters describe the decline of the longleaf pine forest ecosystem, detailing the damage that fire suppression and relentless logging cause, the fate of endangered species, and the connection that Ray feels with the land. Readers from the region, from a similarly impoverished background, or who are interested in the Southern pine forests will appreciate this book. Recommended for large public libraries.ANancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Tony Horwitz
Ray's passion for preserving and restoring this unsung landscape is heartfelt and refreshing.


From Booklist
Even though the vast and now legendary longleaf pine forests that once covered south Georgia had been cut down before she was born, Ray feels as though she has walked within their green filtered light. This knowledge must be genetic, she muses, since her clannish people, called crackers, have lived on this flat and sun-pressed land for 180 years. She explores the complex connection between earth and blood in a spellbinding memoir that entwines family, cultural, and natural history. A tomboy in spite of her strict Apostolic upbringing, Ray always loved the outdoors, although her surroundings were hardly pristine: her family lived in a junkyard and made their modest livelihood as scavengers. Ray describes the junkyard games she and her siblings played and recounts riveting stories from her grandparents' and parents' demanding lives, tales of colossal physical strength, towering faith, unfailing love, and, sadly, mental illness. Ray compares human dramas to the lives of plants and animals and ponders our habits of both abusing nature and praising its beauty. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Ray's redemptive story of an impoverished childhood brings to mind the novels of Dorothy Allison and the nature writing of Amy Blackmarr, but the stunning voice and vision are hers alone. Ray grew up in a junkyard on the outskirts of Baxter, a south Georgia backwater ``about as ugly as a place gets. . . . Unless you look close, there's little majesty.'' She looks close and renders all she sees in prose that's a treat to ear and tongue alike. Precise, illuminating, and striking, her descriptions of family and nature are salted with the jargon of Southern cracker culture and the gritty poetry of the region's flora and fauna. Ray's narrative braids memoir and natural history into a common poignant theme: the search for what's lost. Moving easily between the cast-off ugliness of the junkyard and the majesty of old-growth forest, she finds ample beauty in each. Exploring her family's history of mental illness or chronicling the environmental devastation that destroyed Georgia's once abundant longleaf-pine forest, she's keenly attuned to the precariousness of systemsthe chaos that awaits when they fly out of whack, the difficulty of reassembling them when pieces are missing. She's blessed with interesting relatives: roguish grandfather Charlie is a legendary woodsman and coon hunter, grandmother Clyo a virtuous woman who bootlegs moonshine to feed her family, father Franklin a mechanical genius who subjects his family to fundamentalist Christianity so strict it prohibits Christmas. Despite poverty and social isolation, Ray recalls her childhood as happy and loving, recounting moments of searing pathosas when she and her brothers sneak off to a corner of the junkyard to exchange homemade Christmas presents on the slywithout self-pity. ``Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotismpride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade . . . to own the bad blood.'' Own it she does, with a gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths. "Suffused with the same history-haunted sense of loss that imprints so much of the South and its literature. What sets Ecology of a Cracker Childhood apart is the ambitious and arresting mission implied in its title. . . . Heartfelt and refreshing." - The New York Times Book Review.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

If this book is social history, why does it also read like natural history? Seemingly, that's the point Ray, a naturalist and environmental activist, hopes to make: that she is a product of her environment and therefore tied to it. Through alternating chapters, the author presents a biography of herself and her family and discussion of the longleaf pine tree community of the South (mainly Florida and Georgia). The family stories reveal poverty, strict parental and religious prohibitions, tough discipline, and a family history of mental illness. Writing these stories seems to have been cathartic for Ray, helping her understand why family members acted and believed as they did. Her natural history chapters describe the decline of the longleaf pine forest ecosystem, detailing the damage that fire suppression and relentless logging cause, the fate of endangered species, and the connection that Ray feels with the land. Readers from the region, from a similarly impoverished background, or who are interested in the Southern pine forests will appreciate this book. Recommended for large public libraries.--Nancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Ray's redemptive story of an impoverished childhood brings to mind the novels of Dorothy Allison and the nature writing of Amy Blackmarr, but the stunning voice and vision are hers alone.