Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars, stacks of blown-out tires, and primeval jumbles of rusted metal. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation -- living in the country but not even knowing how to swim -- grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that existed before the region was ever called the South.

In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths. She shows the world perceived from a junkyard by a child reared in a fundamentalist religion with relatives as colorful as any character from fiction. She also catalogs the Edenic beauty of longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, both worlds exist in fragments, cherished and threatened.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood has won an American Book Award, the Southeastern Booksellers Award for non-fiction, and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.

Copies of the book are available at the Furman University Bookstore for $11.95 (retail $14.95).