Book Reviews

Ecology Of A Cracker Childhood
Janisse Ray
Milkweed Edition, 1999

Review By: Zorandra

Janisse Ray pens a memoir not only of her life, but also of the life of the forests she grew up surrounded by. She writes earnestly and with conviction about growing up on a junkyard in rural Georgia; she is forthright about not only her childhood, but also about how it affected her when she went off to college and was independent of her family. Additionally, she writes with this same passion and candidness of the other rural Georgia and its inhabitants: the forests that are being diminished and with them, their occupants.

The chapters are interwoven together, those of family and those of forest and fauna. She does this beautifully allowing the reader to see the interconnectedness not only of people, but of people and the land as well. She takes the reader on a personal journey in both arenas; frankly discussing both her father’s mental illness and what the destruction of the longleaf pine means for the fate of so many of the forest’s denizens.

Though she writes particularly of the Southeast and its plight with logging and clear cutting of forests, it’s an account of what is going on all around us. The epilogue of the book drives home just how much damage has, and is being done there; she includes lists of those species marked as proposed for endangered, endangered, and saddest of all, extinct.

A great read not just for environmentalists or those with a love for the wilderness as her MFA in creative writing shines throughout; she will keep anyone with a desire to hear what she has to say intrigued for the duration. She has definitely written a “people book.”

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