Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Quotes:

"The forests of the southeast find their Rachel Carson.... In Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, part memoir, part clarion call to save the longleaf pine, she casts a loving but unflinching eye on growing up poor and fundamentalist in southeast Georgia.... Sometimes a book is so powerful, it holds its writer hostage.”—Anne Raver, New York Times

“Ray's memoir combines her love of nature, particularly the longleaf South, with her environmental activism."—Pam Kingsbury, TimesDaily

"[University of Mississippi] students were very moved by these two memoirs, by the intertwining of Ray's troubled family history with the troubled history of the longleaf pine system in Georgia.... She has a poetic, passionate way of making us respect her home.”—Mentioned in the Oxford Eagle, Identical article in the Daily Corinthian, Jennifer Southall

“[Ecology of a Cracker Childhood] is a curious blend of memoir and natural history, putting Ray's distinctive South Georgia earth-girl stamp on the genre of Wendell Berry and Rick Bass.”—ajc.com (Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the WEB)

"Her book . . ., a unique combination of memoir and natural history, captures two vanishing souths, the ‘cracker' south and the ‘long-leaf' south.”—Watertown Daily Times

“Ray's prose is graceful and unhuried, yet to the point.”—Grist Magazine

“Part memoir part natural history essay, Janisse Ray's wonderful first book is grounded in a concrete sense of place."—Calyx Journal

“[Ecology of a Cracker Childhood] is a book with a mission.”—ajc.com (Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the Web)

"Ray's genre-busting look melds subjects and styles to create an unusually moving document of life—human and otherwise—on the coastal plains of South Georgia.... The author writes about nature as lovingly and as effectively as she does the ups and downs of her struggling clan.... Consider the effectiveness of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood as an argument for all of us to think beyond our lives.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The language is marvelous, it's accessibleto readers of all ages, and it touches class and race in a way that seems good and enlightening.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Janisse Ray has written a beautiful book that weaves the story of her cloistered upbringing in Baxley, Georgia, with the tragic history of the southeastern pine forests. Ecology Of A Cracker Childhood is really an anthem to the longleaf pine tree, or ‘heart pine' as it is commonly known. It should be dear to the hearts of Savannahians.”—Bill Modell, Creative Loafing

“Janisse Ray has given us a gift with Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a sometimes raw, often gently eloquent memoir of her childhood in a southern Georgia scrapyard.... This is like the best of Annie Dillard and Dorothy Allison combined, an explication not only of an endangered ecosystem, but also of a family system reigned by great love, keen intelligence, and sporadic mental illness.”—Boulder Weekly

“Ray magically conveys the need for conservation juxtaposed with the perverse beauty of the wasteland of her youth. In Janisse Ray, the region has found a worthy and eloquent advocate, perhaps a savior for its hundreds of endangered species.”—E-The Environmental Magazine

“A child grows up poor in a junkyard in Baxley, GA, and writes a terrific book about her life, her family, and the ecology of the longleaf pines.”—Florida Times-Union

“Seamlessly weaving memories of her poverty-stricken childhood with musings about the destruction of the longleaf pine forests that once blanketed Georgia, Ray creates a tapestry of the landscape she carries ‘inside like an ache.' She deftly spins the connections, offering what she has learned: That her personal story is inseparable from the story of her land.” —Linda O'Quinn, Post and Courier

“What makes Ecology of a Cracker Childhood successful is [the] wonder that grows in the junkyard during her childhood, and anger that emerges much later in the forest.”—Rick Van Noy, The Roanoke Times

“Every page of her book is equally vivid, whether she's describing the South Georgia junkyard where she grew up or the longleaf pine forests of today.”—Sharon Rauch, Tallahassee Democrat

“[Ray's] tale of growing up poor and white in backwoods Georgia is 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. Ray's lament for a lost landscape and a lost way of life centers on a South that has little to do with cotillions, columned mansions or cotton plantations.... Ray's passion for preserving this unsung landscape is heartfelt and refreshing.”—Tony Horwitz, New York Times Book Review

“The South's Rachel Carson.... Janisse Ray has written a moving and important book. Her voice needs to be heard.”—(Greensboro, NC) News & Record

“This biography of family and place is tied together like all things made of water, carbon, and nitrogen. Ray reminds us that we are all living things, inextricably mixed with our environment.”—Glenda Burnside, Bloomsbury Review

“In this seamless blend of nature writing and memoir, Ray captures the essence of a unique place and people—and the complex, compromised relationship that all Americans have with the natural world.... She writes poignantly and movingly about herself and her colorful kin, and equally so about the red cockaded woodpecker, the gopher tortoise, the indigo snake and the flatwoods salamander. In the over-tilled fields of memoir and nature writing, Ray has conjured a joyous green shoot of a book.”—Michael Swindle, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Ray's descriptions of the idyllic forests capture their beauty.... The stories are enthralling.”—(Durham) Herald-Sun

“The gorgeously written Ecology of a Cracker Childhood combines memoir and nature writing in such a way as to take the reader there, to the longleaf pine forests of south Georgia before it was all logged away.” —Bloomsbury Review, Editor's Favorite Books of 1999

“By pursuing empathy and understanding instead of a raging blame, Ray's assessment of the white settlers of the Southeast remains tough without being bitter.... Thanks to such honesty, her wish for a new legacy arrives not as an exercise in delusion but as a glimpse of the sublime.... In this time of unparalleled cynicism, any writer cabable of imagining Paradise rebuilt on the ruins of a junkyard ought to command our attention, if not our humble gratitude.”—Philip Connors, Newsday

“More than her passion for the wilderness, her activism or her outrage, it is her capacity for wonder that wins us to her fervent environmentalism—a capacity born and bred, ironically, not in the college biology lab or the naturalist's notebook but in the brier patch of a junkyard adrift with car guts, old lawn mowers, broken glass.”—Amy Godine, Orion

“Prose that's a treat to ear and tongue alike.... Ray's redemptive story of an impovershed 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.... Precise, illuminating, and striking.... Moving easily between the cast-off ugliness of the junkyard and the majesty of old-growth forest, she finds ample beauty in each.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Janisse Ray knows that her region's story and her own story are inseperable; in many ways they are the same story. To tell that story as well as she tells it here is at once to show what has gone wrong and to light the way ahead. This book, clearly, is only a beginning. It is well done and is very moving.”—Wendell Berry

“Every edangered ecosystem should have such an eloquent spokesman.”—Bailey White

”One theme of this smart book hit me particularly hard: there are no wastelands on this planet, only places that could regain some of the balance and beauty that lies not so far in their past.”—Bill McKibben

“My students were very moved by these two memoirs, by the intertwining of Ray's troubled family history with the troubled history of the longleaf pine system in Georgia.... She has a poetic, passionate way of making us respect her home.”—Daily Corinthian, quote from Prof. Joan Wylie Hall, University of Mississippi

“What impresses me most about this astonishing book is the seamless interweaving of personal memior and natural history—an interweaving the more remarkable in view of the jolting differences between the junkyard of the author's childhood and what is left of the natural landscape of her beloved south Georgia. ”—Jim Kilgo, author of Deep Enough for Ivorybills

“In a blend of memoir and nature writing, Ray explores our complex relationship with nature against the backdrop of the junk yard where she grew up and the vanishing longleaf pine forests of southern Georgia.”—Erin Murphy Sanders, Trenton Times

“Janisse Ray is a role model for countless future rural writers to come.”—Wes Jackson

“Janisse Ray is a strong and imaginative writer.”—Peter Matthiessen

“A compelling dimension of Ray's work is her scrupulous attentiveness to the human spirit.”—Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice

“Originally published in 2000, this memoir of an impoverished childhood got a second life this year when the Georgia Center for the Book chose it as the title for the All Georgia Reading the Same Book program.” —Tray Butler, Creative Loafing

"On the cover of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janise Ray is touted as the Rachel Carson of the Southeast. Such a statement is not far off the mark, but it does not tell enough about this unusual memoir. Ray, a self-described 'cracker,' grew up in the flat, humid wiregrass of the South Georgia coastal plain. Her parents claimed they found her on a bed of pine needles under 'bayonet-tipped palmetto fronds' in their junkyard(p.6). (para) . . . She uses a structure of alternating chapters on her life and the ecological history of her region. As memoir this reinforces the sense that humans are intertwined with the environment as she connects personal experience with changes in the landscape. She provides a respectful but critical insider's view of significant themes of Southern history: poverty, religion, cracker culture, and the transformative power of education. (para) This impressionistic book demonstrates that the Muir branch of environmental writing is alive and well. Nature is important in and of itself, but humans learn and are bettered from communing in and with it. All this fits in very well with Milkweed Edition's mission of publishing works on the intimate connection of humans and the natural world. (para) Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a stirring work that can benefit any reader. Because it covers an often over-looked region of the South, undergraduates could profitably read this as an introduction to twentieth century environmental history or Southern history. Ray personalizes the interaction of man and environment and draws attention to the subtle qualities of forests that disappear when the landscape is regarded as a giant field for cultivating. This book is also a call to action to realize her 'dream [that] we can bring back the longleaf… along with sandhills and savannas … and … all the herbs and trees and wild animals, the ones not irretrievably lost, which deserve an existence apart from slavery to our own' (p. 270) Ray is subtle as a chainsaw here, but it may be too late for subtlety if the South has any hope of coming to a new sense of the old cliché that it 'will rise again' (p.272)”—Environmental History, v8 No. 4, October 2003, James Tuten

"Janisse Ray's award-winning Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is one of those books that can open up a whole unfamiliar world, both the culture of generations of south Georgia 'crackers' and the endangered ecosystem of majestic longleaf pine forests. With vividness and intensity, Ray recounts her family's joys and hardships (para) She melds this portrait with a coastal plains landscape re-created by her adult perspective as a naturalist. (comparison) Ray practices a special kind of environmental writing, powerfully interweaving memories of a beloved family with her passion to save a treasured landscape.” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Andrea Dimino