Overview
Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp.Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart.
Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there--naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, down home prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.
About the Author: Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1. She is the author of Wild Card Quilt and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award, as well as the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award.
A naturalist, environmental activist, and winner of the 1996 Merriam Frontier Award, she has also published her work in Wild Earth, Orion, Florida Naturalist, and Georgia Wildlife and has been a nature commentator for Georgia Public Radio. She moved this year to Vermont, but still spends much of her time in Georgia.
Synopsis
Activist Ray explores southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp, a vital watershed that links the Okefenokee and the Osceola National Forest. She lives with the swamp, tastes it, talks with its people, and finds the swamp is the stuff of real life, with that real life in need of care. She keeps her narratives small and her insights within large, addressing the need for wilderness in our environment and in ourselves, the need for stunning beauty in the ordinary, and the need for healing in a fragmented age. She describes the animals who make the swamp their home and those who make it their highway, the people who cull a gentle living from it those who dishearten it, and those who are trying to save it. She creates a distinct non-fiction through her episodic, novelistic approach, creating a clear image of a place and those who love it. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
The author of the American Book Award-winning Ecology of a Cracker Childhood celebrates South Georgia's humble Pinhook Swamp in an impassioned and poetic account of the area's environmental fragmentation and its subsequent restoration. The swamp, "170,000 acres of dreary dismal... too deep for a human to wade in, too shallow for a boat to draw," and populated by flies and mosquitoes, is the corridor connecting the Okefenokee Swamp with Osceola National Park. Most of its acres have now been purchased and protected, but environmentalists' work, Ray warns, is not finished yet. In impressionistic, lyrical chapters, Ray meditates on the meaning of silence ("Silence is the ghost of the panther" that used to populate Pinhook), the animals of the area (black bears, bees, frogs) and the people dedicated to saving it. She also includes poems, a Native American blessing and italicized reflections on the land's fragmentation ("the separation of habitat in a landscape... chopping a wild place into pieces") by roads, logging, mining and developments. Her moving book is a tribute to a small but crucial wild place and a call for readers to help preserve it and others like it. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.