I read the book straight through after getting it. But did not read it in the same order of the chapters. It is written like a quilt allowing you to read what you want, randomly as you would look at a quilt's intricate details. Yet no matter how read, you end up with a larger perspective and pattern that gives you much greater meaning and understanding.

It is nice for Janisse to allow the reader the freedom of finding ones own perspective and interests when reading the book. It also makes sharing the experience of the book with friend and family easier.

My friend read the chapter of the writing group, right after coming from her own writing group. In a stone faced way she put the book down after reading the chapter, and burst out laughing. There was a part I read about Janisse's father and her in a big fight that made me cry at a moment in the interchange.

It would make good reading for someone contemplating going home to a rural community, or for someone who never dreamed of doing so. It is a poetic story of family and home and geography.

Janisse weaves very different personal yet universal experiences with family and friends, rural community, and natural and cultural landscapes into a geographic quilt, giving an emergent property of perspective, that is difficult to see without being layed out in full view like a picture - and with the benefit of context in time and space and emotion.

There are many reasons that a person goes back to their origins.

Janisse goes back much like a wild animal that has been expatriated from a geographic area. She comes back to rediscover the origins if birth, and fill to fill gaps left in her imagination and community.

What is nice is that she finds a niche with intelligence, and sensitivity to community and region. I can imagine native species like panther and wolves having a more difficult time rediscovering their original landscapes, even though they might play an equal or more important role. Reintroducing fire to the pineland landscpae is also difficult, but necessary.

Janisse comes back as quite as she can, and slowly finds a role. Not a dominant role but one which fills a gap. She is more like the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker than a panther or wolve or fire, being sensitive and fragile; and having an infinity for home and old growth and wild romote places. At the same time providing intelligence and energy that those in the rural communities and cities can benefit from.

Rural communities in the south need natives, especially those that can fill important roles. Too many rural areas export not only there natural resources, but also their most valuable human resources. They become vulnerable to exotics who completely transform and exploit the community without consideration of the integrity of local community or ecology and its needs. They come without understanding place. Much of what remains is remanents of a highly exploited cultural and ecological resources.

What is nice is that, like the coming home of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker Janisse helps facilitate the rediscovery of interest in rural community assets like schools and remenants of wild places, like pines and rivers that are critical assets of the geography.

Janisse uses her skills with those of the locals to reclaim geography and recreate the imgination of place. She comes not like a conquering hero, but like wild card pattern in quilt that catches your eye, without dominating your thought. She makes you think about important things. She offers an alternative future senaarios for geography that preserves and rediscover inherient values, while helping to create new values. This is in harsh contrast to to those that exploit rural landscapes without the imagination of cultural and ecological values that have existed, but have been largely surpressed.

Beautifully written book that appeals to a wide range of people--so it would be a great gift for Father's Day or for anyone's birthday. I laughed out loud many times.

Janisse Ray is passionate about the environment, most specifically that part of it in southeast Georgia. Her environment is mostly the natural world--the longleaf pine forest (the remnants thereof), the Altamaha River--but also the human world in the small town of Baxley, her family farmstead, her father's junkyard. She left these surroundings to go to college, first in north Georgia and then in Montana. She "took a chance on home" (the book's subtitle) when she returned to Baxley with her young son, determined to make a life for them both. She demonstrates that ability to observe, think, and then put into words those observations and thoughts is a far greater treasure than glitz and glamour.

The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood By Janisse Ray

"The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" is a delightful book, beautifully written and filled with wisdom. Janisse Ray made me feel like a child again. What it is like to have a soul of a poet and live in a junkyard in rural Georgia with a family of fundamentalists. Her love for South Georgia's vanishing natural beauty and history is infectious. She beautifully illustrates, through the story of the long leaf pine, that in saving our ecosystem we save ourselves.

This book had the same impact on me as Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING, but even more so, because ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD takes place in my own backyard.

Ray blends nature history with the story of her life, and you become aware that she really is a "child of the pines". Selected as the Best Non-Fiction Book of 2000 by Southern Book Critics Circle, ECOLOGY OF A CRACKER CHILDHOOD should be required reading in Georgia high schools.

Oooooooo-eeee. I cannot tell you the number of times you will pause while reading this extraordinarily sensitive and profoundly moving life-story. Some of your pauses will feature your face wreathed in smiles, for Janisse Ray's "Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" is a celebration of both place and family, and her finely-delineated family sketches and gloriously-rendered anecdotes and teeming with respect and affection for her family. Other pauses will find you, I am sure, hands on knees, weeping. For there is great pain in this book as well...the pain of a place that is gradually disappearing, the pain of understanding your place in that place, the pain of coming to grips with the flaws of your heritage.

One reviewer, Wes Jackson, said, "Janisse Ray is a role model for countless future rural writers to come." I believe that he understates Ms. Ray's importance. To tell the truth, she is a role model, plain and simple. It is my hope that this stirring memoir will vault her into our nation's consciousness and conscience. This daughter of a Cracker junkyard owner has a significant message to tell us, and her language is simply remarkable. Her verbal imagery is astounding; her precise descriptions -- of humans, flora and fauna -- are models of elegance.

I am willing to bet that there are more than a few readers who could only imagine the possible union of Ms. Ray and Rick Bragg ("All Over but the Shoutin'"). These two white Southerners have much to teach us about family, conscience, commitments and reverence of place.

"Ecology of a Cracker Childhood" will emerge as one of our century's most important works. Be glad to have read it when it first came out.