Though it ends with a grace note as her mother and father sow their land with longleaf, in essence it’s an elegy for a...
Evocative observations about her return to the southern family farm in an attempt to gather fragments and make her life whole.
In 1997, after 17 years away, Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, 1999) came back to “my grandmother’s heart-pine house, amid tobacco fields and cow pastures in Spring Branch, a farming section in northern Appling County, Georgia.” She had with her a son and a lot of memories, not all of them good. Those many years before she had gladly left a family “proud, fervently religious, marred by lunacy, suspicious . . . doomed to isolation,” but she felt a tug of duty and an obligation to honor the place, land, kin, and history, a desire to experience the human spirit of an agrarian community. Ray finds both community and sense of place eroded and compromised: the woods have been clear-cut, the historic buildings in town bulldozed, the crossroads turned into four-lane highways to somewhere else, the local school closed. She also finds lasting beauty on the landscape, a steady local economy, and a cast of genuine country dwellers. With a casual lyricism, the author unravels the intricate and intriguing longleaf pine ecosystem, from the wiregrass that burns to keep the trees regenerating to the Chickasaw plums and tannin-wracked rivers, red-cockaded woodpecker and peach-colored clay. She lights a little more fire under her writing when it comes to human behavior, and not just in scorning the rapaciousness of the lumber companies, but in tribute to the old system of barter and obligation that still holds, promoting mutual beneficence, trust, and balance. With a fine quilter's hand, Ray weaves new stories (of music festivals, riverkeepers, referendums, her son moving north, her whole unusual family) into the rapidly diminishing store of old ones.
Though it ends with a grace note as her mother and father sow their land with longleaf, in essence it’s an elegy for a ravaged place without a needle to its compass.Pub Date: May 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-57131-272-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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