Writer Profile
Books & Essays
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Title:
The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South
Date Published:
University of Georgia Press 1999Description:
The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Archie Carr's chapter is entitled "Living with an Alligator."
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.
Book Review #1:
"This 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 Writing
Book Review #2:"I 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 Writers
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Title:
A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden
Date Published:
Yale University Press 1996Description:
Archie Carr (1909-1987), the eminent naturalist, writer, and conservationist, was particularly entranced by the wildlife and ecosystems of Florida, where he lived for more than fifty years. This captivating book-which includes some of his most enchanting essays-is full of memorable details and anecdotes about the flora, fauna, and humans that have inhabit Florida's colorful landscape.
Book Review #1:
When the distinguished naturalist Archie Carr first ranged through the Florida marshes, swamps, and hammocks, the state was a paradise for biologists, a relatively unexplored Eden. Florida would change greatly. And for five decades, Carr, a professor of zoology at the University of Florida who died in 1987, would write about its natural beauty and the encroachments upon it. More than two dozen essays in this collection show his writing at its best. "Carr's essays of Florida shine with charm, grandeur, and a childlike delight. This is the writing not only of a brilliant naturalist, but of a poet and of a journalist. It stands as a memoir to a breathtaking paradise, and as an eloquent call to save what's left of it. --Carl Hiaasen