Böcker av Janisse Ray

¿Janisse Ray at her best¿. If there¿s a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I¿ve not met her.¿ ¿ Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk across Americäs Most Hopeful LandscapeFrom the bestselling author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, an exploration of the astounding and vanishing wild world.

¿Janisse Ray at her best¿. If there¿s a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I¿ve not met her.¿ ¿ Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk across Americäs Most Hopeful LandscapeFrom the bestselling author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, an exploration of the astounding and vanishing wild world.

”A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty.”—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and fight for the places they love. This edition, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the original publication, updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

Janisse Ray was a babe in arms when a boat of her fathers construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River. Tucked in a life preserver, she washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows.The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodiversity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the worlds last great places.The Altamaha is Rays river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. Drifting into Darien begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to meditations on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now.Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature. She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radfords mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.