Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Savoy, Lauret (signed)

ISBN 10: 1619025736 / ISBN 13: 9781619025738

Published by Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2015

About this Item

Signed on the title page. Uncommon signed. This book is in the vanguard of environmental writing and is one of the most respected environmental works of the last decade or beyond. It's an excavation of forgotten, often atrocious and racist, histories in the strata of American place. Savoy is a geologist who, before this book, was best known in literary circles for her influential anthology The Colors of Nature, co-edited with Alison Hawthorne Deming. Trace is her first solo literary work and was the winner of an American Book Award and an Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Creative Writing Book Award, along with a host of other finalist nods. Prominent blurb by Terry Tempest Williams: "I have never read a more beautiful, smart, and vulnerable accounting of how we are shaped by memory of place." A fine book in a fine jacket with a red circular "autographed copy" sticker at the upper right corner of the front panel.

Seller Inventory # 1231

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
• Publisher: Counterpoint, Berkeley
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1619025736
• ISBN 13: 9781619025738
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Environmental Justice
  • Nature/Environmental Essay
  • Environmental History
  • Geology
  • Women in the Environment

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Lauret Savoy is a woman of mixed heritage, and a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the intertwinings of natural and cultural histories. She writes about the stories we tell of the origins of the American land and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. She lives in Leverett, MA.