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    Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: The World as Home
    Unavailable
    Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: The World as Home
    Unavailable
    Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: The World as Home
    Audiobook7 hours

    Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: The World as Home

    Written by Janisse Ray

    Narrated by Janisse Ray

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLantern Audio
    Release dateSep 25, 2015
    ISBN9781942248750
    Unavailable
    Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: The World as Home

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    Reviews for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

    4/5

    18 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Ray's memoir actually crosses several genres, switching between quasi-fictive recreations of family history, anthologies of backwoods tall tales, descriptive natural histories of the longleaf pine woods ecosystem, essays on human interaction with the landscape and its creatures, as well as personal reflections on growing up.Of those, the personal reflections are the most effectively written, though to me the ecological descriptions are more innately interesting. The book makes the attempt to fill the gaps in several lines of literary exploration and I support the effort. In all, however, I think that the book's real impact is too limited to the author, for whom the project was no doubt monumental. For the reader, it's a lightweight.
    • 4/5
      Ray grew up in a junkyard in rural Georgia with forests all around and she combines her rural southern childhood experiences with the ecology of the forests she loved. Erica Kline
    • 3/5
      In my mind, strong solid Southern writing is based upon a strong sense of place. There is no place like the South and Ray does a good job of capturing it. Some of here paragraphs are postcard perfect, and will have you swearing you smell pine trees as you read. This work of non-fiction traces Ray's family history and child rearing in rural Georgia back in the 1960's. You'll find old ladies moon shining and poor people just as proud and noble as any war hero. Just as any storied southern place has.Ray's nostalgic love of the land around her sparks some political tones in the book. And this is where I'm not too excited about the book.I have to say while I agree almost 100% with Ray's love/concern for the environment, I do wish she had stuck to telling her southern fried stories and then wrote a follow up book concerning all of the ecological issues. These issues never squashed the story, but just seemed to drag it down a little.All in all, a read I'm glad I picked up, though nothing super-stellar.
    • 3/5
      Engrossing memoir of growing up in southern Georgia in the sixties and seventies. While poor, Ray's family was better off than many in the wasteland of the Georgia coastal plain. However, her upbringing as the child of a manic-depressive, holy roller father set her apart. Her home was alongside her father's business, a junkyard. Ray traces the effect of her up bringing on the course she would take as an adult. Her relationship with her complex and highly intelligent father is one of the centrepieces of the book. Ray interweaves her memories of her family with chapters on the ecology of the longleaf pine forests which have been nearly whipped out in the southern US. I found the chapters on her family and childhood more effective than the ones dealing with ecology, although some of these were very informative. The later ones are a bit heavy-handed in her attempts to be eloquent. very readable, informative and thoughtful. I am goingto keep this around for a bit since I think my son will enjoy it.
    • 3/5
      Janisse Ray carefully intertwined two distinct themes in her autobiographical book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. First, there was the theme of her family - an interesting tapestry of men (mostly) and women who made up her genetic landscape. Second, there was the ecological theme - chapters about the deforestation of south Georgia. Ray loved, admired and respected her family and her forest, and this tenderness made her memoir charming and memorable.Wrapped in the sweet cadence of her language, I especially enjoyed reading about Ray's family. That was a colorful bunch. Most of the men suffered from mental illness, which Ray depicted with dignity. But they were also resourceful - living off the land and inventing machines from scraps. I could hear their drawl in every page.All in all, I enjoyed this short book about this beautiful region of our country, their Southern ways and Ray's determination to protect and preserve the land that she loves.