Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South - Hardcover

Kirby, Jack Temple

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807830577 ISBN 13: 9780807830574

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 2006

Synopsis

The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and more insect infested and disease prone than other regions of the country. It is alluring to the scientifically and poetically minded alike. WithMockingbird Song, Jack Temple Kirby offers a personal and passionate recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. Exhibiting violent cycles of growth, abandonment, dereliction, resettlement, and reconfiguration, this relationship, Kirby suggests, has the sometimes melodious, sometimes cacophonous vocalizations of the region's emblematic avian, the mockingbird.

In a narrative voice marked by the intimacy and enthusiasm of a storyteller, Kirby explores all of the South's peoples and their landscapes--how humans have used, yielded, or manipulated varying environments and how they have treated forests, water, and animals. Citing history, literature, and cinematic portrayals along the way, Kirby also relates how southerners have thought about their part of Earth--as a source of both sustenance and delight.

About this title

Reviews

From New England to the Pacific Northwest, each region of the country evokes its own cultural personality, but perhaps none is as abundant in iconic imagery as the American South. From king cotton to Kentucky's trademark fried chicken, plantation life to "poor white trash," the products, politics, poetry, and polemics that created and define the region are rigorously examined in Kirby's extensively researched profile of a singular land and its people. Using a sweeping interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeology, agronomy, geology, sociology, and zoology, professor and historian Kirby traces the South's metamorphosis from the pre-Columbian epoch of its Native American tribal inhabitants through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the culturally homogenized emergence of the so-called New South. Citing literary classics such as The Yearling and contemporary cinematic fare such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? Kirby ecumenically draws on cultural and historical references to ponder the ethics of human behavior and its effect upon a land that has suffered and survived abuses social and ecological. Carol Haggas
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Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807830577
• ISBN 13: 9780807830574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 361