Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
By Lauret Savoy. Counterpoint Press: Berkeley, CA, 2015.
Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Listen to a recent public radio interview on “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
In this powerful and provocative meditation on place, race, and the unvoiced presence of the past, Lauret Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history marks a person, a people, and the land itself. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she weaves together human stories of migration, displacement, and erasure with personal journeys across a continent and time. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” to the origin of names on the land, and from the U.S.–Mexico border to the U.S. capital, Trace counters some of our oldest and most damaging public silences by revealing often-unrecognized ties, such as the siting of Washington, DC, and the economic motives of slavery. None of these links is coincidental. Few appear in public history. All touch us.
“ . . . this sui generis creation, wherein John McPhee meets James Baldwin, dissolves all academic boundaries.” —Vulture, New York Magazine
In the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “We have waited a very long time for Trace by Lauret Savoy. Too long. Her words are a stunning excavation and revelation of race, identity and the American landscape. I have never read a more beautiful, smart, and vulnerable accounting of how we are shaped by memory in place . . . Trace is a crucial book for our time.”
“Trace is a very important book—for me, and for the wider field or terrain of landscape-and-memory. Delicate in its thinking, and bold in its style and form. And so subtle in the way Lauret Savoy lets earth-processes and emotional/historical processes illuminate one another as metaphors, without subordinating either to the other by means of a system as fixed as allegory. Erosion . . . silting . . . flow . . . concealment . . . exposure . . . I relished seeing through her different beholding eyes, in their several forms of ‘difference.’” —Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks and Mountains of the Mind
Lauret Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the intertwining of natural and cultural histories. Her other 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. She lives in Leverett, Massachusetts.
The book will be out in paperback in fall 2016 and is available for course adoption. See this PDF for details: Trace Paperback Press Release
Read more at www.lauretsavoy.com
