Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South - Hardcover

Kirby, Jack Temple

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807830577 ISBN 13: 9780807830574

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 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. With Mockingbird 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

Book Description:

" Mockingbird Song is an altogether original work, beautifully crafted, superbly written, and of timely scholarly interest. It is the first major book that provides a sweeping overview of the centrality of the environment to understanding the history of the American South, and it has the literary qualities of our finest narrative historians."--Charles Reagan Wilson, editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

From the Inside Flap:

Jack Temple Kirby offers a personal and passionate recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. 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 edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0807830577
• ISBN 13: 9780807830574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384