The Woods Stretched For Miles: New Nature Writing From The South

The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South

ReviewThis is an important book-the first of its kind exclusively on the Southeast. It should appeal to general readers who wish to read about the genre in the Southeast, about the long and complex relationship between American culture and nature, and also about controversial environmental issues in the region. -- John Murray - editor of American Nature WritingI am delighted with the very concept of this anthology of Southern nature writing. There are dozens and dozens of recent scholarly books on environmental literature and anthologies of nonfiction nature writing, nature poetry, and environmental writing in general, including a number of regionally oriented collections. But, so far, other than Molly Westling's ecocritical studies of Southern fiction, few of these recent publications are explicitly devoted to Southern environmental literature. For this reason, there is a significant void that the The Woods Stretched for Miles is intended to fill-and I think it fills the void quite well. -- Scott Slovic - author of Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for WritersThe Woods Stretched for Miles is by turns lively, enchanting, provocative, amusing. It will be a great gift, and a great anthology for classroom use. -- ISLEThese writers are careful and accurate observers of both emotion and place. . . . The language is exceptional. -- Library JournalThe Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. This remarkable group encompasses not only such well-known names as Wendell Berry and Rick Bass but also distinctive new voices, including Christopher Camuto, Susan Cerulean, and Eddy L. Harris.From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.From Publishers WeeklyMingling environmental concerns, naturalist observation and appreciation of the South's distinctive landscape and culture, this adventurous anthology is full of indelible forays deep into nature, the American South and ecology. Exploring Mississippi's Black Creek Wilderness Area, which awaits federal approval as an officially protected zone, Rick Bass audaciously, perhaps quixotically, advances the idea of creating "buffered wilderness" regions that would remain as close as possible to what the country's first settlers encountered. Combing North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, Christopher Camuto assesses the cultural loss flowing from the near total destruction of the old-growth forest. Naturalist Susan Cerulean's agile report describes biologists' fieldwork radio-tagging and monitoring the endangered, migratory swallow-tailed kite, which nests in Florida and winters in South America. Nature gets confrontational in several of these essays. Archie Carr weighs the mixed blessings of coexisting with a 300-pound Florida alligator in his front-yard pond; Jan DeBlieu faces down Hurricane Gloria on Cape Hatteras. Counterpoised to first-person narratives of grand river trips wending through family and regional history, there is Mary Q. Steele's quietly exquisite celebration of her daily interaction with nature in a Tennessee suburb. Also included are E.O. Wilson's luminous recollection of a formative Alabama boyhood summer, Wendell Berry's far from idyllic