One of the first lessons you probably heard from your mother was “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. And she probably wasn’t talking about books when she said it. She was probably talking about your neighbors, or the new kid, or anyone who might have seemed a little weird to you as a child. Don’t judge a person on superficial things like how they are dressed, or the color of their skin, or the way they talk.
I don’t think that message is getting out much these days. In fact, it seems like the opposite holds true. We judge books and people by their covers. We dress and act like we expect to be judged by our covers. Image has dominion over content. So if I said that I had just read a book by a woman who grew up in a junkyard in rural Georgia, who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church so strict they didn’t allow Christmas, you might think you have heard you need to know.
You would be wrong. The book is called Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. And although I have just given you an accurate description of her story, (right out of the book jacket, in fact), it does nothing to convey what a moving and picturesque memoir this book really is. The word “cracker” stands for a southern, especially Georgian, poor white trash. The term probably comes from an early English word meaning “braggart”. But there is no bragging in Janisse Ray’s memoir. It is sad and thoughtful, passionately yet simply told.
Ray’s childhood was isolated by her family’s rural home and her father’s fundamentalist beliefs. Her only playmates were her older brothers and sister. Her only role models were her parents and an odd assortment of relatives. But living on the edge of town meant she also lived on the edge of wilderness. Her father’s junkyard was surrounded by an expanse of long leaf pine forest. Janisse played in the woods as often as she played among the mountains of wrecked cars. She grew to love the outdoors. When she finally left home for college, she majored in ecology. She has spent the greater part of her career campaigning to save the last few virgin stands of the long leaf pine- an entire ecosystem that is being decimated by our society’s insatiable desire for lumber.
It is the long leaf pine that you see all over Wilmington, left for its meager shade in housing developments after the hardwoods have been logged off. But these aren’t first or even second generation trees. To get an idea of the size and majesty of the pine forest as Janisse Ray remembers it, visit Hugh McRae park and look at the size of the trees there.
Ray knows that the pine woods seem monotonous to the untrained eye. But she points out the incredible diversity of the forest is there- you just need to “look real close”. She implies the same about her own family. She may have grown up a “redneck”, but her father was a mechanical and mathematical genius, although he never went to school. The people in her family all had high IQ’s, and would sit by the fire at night doing figures they way my mother would sit by the fire and knit. With the genius also came a history of mental depression. The children lived in fear of being “took sick”, like so many in their family. And yet, Janisse Ray repeats a letter her father wrote about his stay in the Georgia State Mental Institution, and it is the single most moving piece I have ever read on mental illness.
At every turn, this book offers the reader something unexpected, or heartbreaking, or funny, or uplifting. It will remind readers of the best of Annie Dillard. But I don’t think that even Annie Dillard could have found as much beauty in the piles of rusty cars as Janisse Ray has. We are incredibly lucky that she took the time to “look real close”.

Engrossing memoir of growing up in southern Georgia in the sixties and seventies. While poor, Ray's family was better off than many in the wasteland of the Georgia coastal plain. However, her upbringing as the child of a manic-depressive, holy roller father set her apart. Her home was alongside her father's business, a junkyard. Ray traces the effect of her up bringing on the course she would take as an adult. Her relationship with her complex and highly intelligent father is one of the centrepieces of the book.

Ray interweaves her memories of her family with chapters on the ecology of the longleaf pine forests which have been nearly whipped out in the southern US. I found the chapters on her family and childhood more effective than the ones dealing with ecology, although some of these were very informative. The later ones are a bit heavy-handed in her attempts to be eloquent.

very readable, informative and thoughtful.

I am goingto keep this around for a bit since I think my son will enjoy it. ( )

I love this book so much. Poetry, memoir, ecological plea, and language that slips through your head and hands. I reread it regularly. It sometimes makes me cry.

Janisse Ray carefully intertwined two distinct themes in her autobiographical book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. First, there was the theme of her family - an interesting tapestry of men (mostly) and women who made up her genetic landscape. Second, there was the ecological theme - chapters about the deforestation of south Georgia. Ray loved, admired and respected her family and her forest, and this tenderness made her memoir charming and memorable.

Wrapped in the sweet cadence of her language, I especially enjoyed reading about Ray's family. That was a colorful bunch. Most of the men suffered from mental illness, which Ray depicted with dignity. But they were also resourceful - living off the land and inventing machines from scraps. I could hear their drawl in every page.

All in all, I enjoyed this short book about this beautiful region of our country, their Southern ways and Ray's determination to protect and preserve the land that she loves. ( )

Ray's memoir actually crosses several genres, switching between quasi-fictive recreations of family history, anthologies of backwoods tall tales, descriptive natural histories of the longleaf pine woods ecosystem, essays on human interaction with the landscape and its creatures, as well as personal reflections on growing up.

Of those, the personal reflections are the most effectively written, though to me the ecological descriptions are more innately interesting. The book makes the attempt to fill the gaps in several lines of literary exploration and I support the effort. In all, however, I think that the book's real impact is too limited to the author, for whom the project was no doubt monumental. For the reader, it's a lightweight. ( )