stories southern childhood wholeness

books:

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home

5 reviews
Janisse Ray

Milkweed Editions, 2003

A powerful writer
Janisse Ray is passionate about the environment, most specifically that part of it in southeast Georgia. Her environment is mostly the natural world--the longleaf pine forest (the remnants thereof), the Altamaha River--but also the human world in the small town of Baxley, her family farmstead, her father's junkyard. She left these surroundings to go to college, first in north Georgia and then ...

Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home (World As Home, The)

4 reviews
Janisse Ray

Milkweed Editions, 2004

prophetic, poetic, passionate: Ray's ecology inspires
If Janisse Ray's first memoir, "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood," is an evocative reclamation of a treasured Southern ecological system, her sequel, "Wild Card Quilt" emerges as a moving, inspiring and passionate attempt to reclaim her adult life. Ray's poetic prose is part autobiography, part self-identification with place and part manifesto. Her writing soars with exquisite metaphor and ...

Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land

3 reviews
Janisse Ray

Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2005

A blend of natural history and philosophy which is winning and thought-provoking
Wilderness is a necessary part of life if humans are to heal - and so are the animals which form it. Pinhook Swamp is a watershed and wildlife corridor linking different wildlife refuges in the South: Janisse Ray's Pinhook: Finding Wholeness In A Fragmented Land follows the swamp's need for restoration and the human concurrent need for wilderness, providing a blend of natural history and ...

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

37 reviews
Janisse Ray

Milkweed Editions, 1999

Musings on our many environments from a kindred spirit
"Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" is probably the most moving autobiography I've ever read. By turns heartbreaking, inspirational, and motivational, Ray's story is one of an outsider in every respect; the daughter of a junkyard owner in rural Georgia, she faces a number of obstacles including her father's precarious mental stability. Looking back with a mix of fondness and acceptance rather than ...

Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf

2 reviews
Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray, ...

Heart of the Earth, 2004

Between Two Rivers
This book is a microcosm of the rural northwest Florida life, providing wonderful insights into a faded and slowly fading lifestyle in a soon-to-be-discoverred part of the south. Having moved to the area four years ago, it gave me some local information provided by stories of those who grew up in the area and were a part of its history. Should be required reading for students in the northwest ...

Where We Stand: Voices Of Southern Dissent

3 reviews
Charles Bussey, Dan Carter, ...

NewSouth Books, 2004

The More Things Change, . . . the more they stay the same.
The twelve voices of dissent in WHERE WE STAND demand, in heartfelt prose, for an end to the domination of America by ideologically right-wing Republicans, a majority of whom are southerners, all of whom are in bed with the military-industrial-complex. WHERE WE STAND traces the rise of the modern Republican South from the entry into national politics of racist southern politician George C. ...