#paperback #race #geography #creative #American #cultural #ancestors

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Iowa

Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

With a New Preface by the Author

Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America's still unfolding history and ideas of "race" have marked its people and the land.

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost.

A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from "Indian Territory" and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.

In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories--natural, personal, cultural--to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America.

"Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory--and to be one.

Trace

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#race #history #america #lyric #essay #landscape #ecology #memory

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America's still unfolding history and ideas of 'race' have marked its people and the land.

Connecticut

Culture, Identity, and the Natural World

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in today's world is reflected in our richly various stories--stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature.

Featuring work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds--including Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths; Robin Wall Kimmerer on the language of the natural world; Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his Louisiana hometown to a blind faith in capitalism; and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of "unpredictable" nature--The Colors of Nature works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.

Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.

Lauret Savoy

Trace

Lauret Savoy

Trace

Alison Hawthorne Deming (Editor); Lauret E. Savoy (Editor)

The Colors of Nature