Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
An essayistic memoir that follows the relationship between memory, history, race, and the American landscape.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Counterpoint
- Published
- 2016-09-13
- Pages
- 240 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14 x 1.83 x 20.93 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781619028258
- ISBN-10
- 1619028255
- Price
- 2894 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Education & Reference/Writing, Research & Publishing Guides/Writing/Travel
With a New Preface by the Author 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.
LAURET SAVOY is a woman of African American, Euro-American, and Indigenous ancestry, and the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the stories we tell of the American land’s origins 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 .
Reviews
-
Very highly recommended.
The blurbs on the dust jacket are spot on so I will only add that this book really moved me, made me think about our history and the winners who wrote it, the histories we inherit from our parents (or not) and how these shape our way of seeing the world, how I fit into and relate to the place I call home, and how many layers of history personal/cultural/and geological overlay every locale in the USA. An honest, thoughtful, emotionally provoking and revealing, exploration of people and place across time. At times the content can be raw and tough, at others gentle and serene. The writing throughout is exceptional. Very highly recommended.
-
An intriguing read
This book will irritate some, intrigue others and make every reader think. I enjoyed it very much and found her links between land, race and personal history very much worth reading.
-
Fascinating journey
Although the reading is often dense, the methodology and the stories she tells along the way kept me engaged. She writes well and beautifully combines history, place and people on her quest.
-
Thoughtful and loving despite incidents that made me wince
Thoughtful and loving despite descriptions of incidents that made me wince, Trace lays out the complicated history of origins, place names, honoring (or dishonoring) the ancestors. For instance, she has visited historic sites where the guides are uncomfortable discussing the slaves who worked there and were buried there, and she spends much of her journey around the US looking for origin stories her parents were uncomfortable telling her. After reading it, I donated it to my town's Multicultural Network library, it must be read, savored, shared.
-
Mind lighting
I am old white woman, living in Georgia who has frequently wondered to myself about the questions MS Savoy pursues . Who were the unknown, unheard ancestors , what were their lives like? so much of our national history has been covered up maybe b/c it was shameful, inconvenient, denigrated. It is enriching, curious humanizing, . Yes, it's painful, shaming, strange also. MS Savoy 's great knowledge of geology & geography as analogies of history creates a bridge one can cross to her greater truth. It lights up the reader's mind & heart.