Mockingbird Song
Subtitle: Ecological Landscapes of the South
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; University of North Carolina Press
Published: October 11, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780807830574
Subjects: NATURAL HISTORY, COUNTRY LIFE & PETS; United States - State & Local - South; Landscape asessment; Geographical perception; Nature; Sociology; Southern States; Nature/Ecology; Southeastern & South Atlantic states; Ecology; Human Geography; Nature / General; environmental history; nature; Howard W. Odum; Eugene P. Odum; Howard T. Odum; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Zora Neale Hurston; William Faulkner; hunting; General; Essays; Human ecology; Landscape assessment
Description: The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and more insect-infested and disease-prone than other regions of the country. It is alluring to the scientifically and poetically minded alike. WithMockingbird Song, Jack Temple Kirby offers a personal and passionate recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. Exhibiting violent cycles of growth, abandonment, dereliction, resettlement, and reconfiguration, this relationship, Kirby suggests, has the sometimes melodious, sometimes cacophonous vocalizations of the region's emblematic avian, the mockingbird. In a narrative voice marked by the intimacy and enthusiasm of a storyteller, Kirby explores all of the South's peoples and their landscapes?how humans have used, yielded, or manipulated varying environments and how they have treated forests, water, and animals. Citing history, literature, and cinematic portrayals along the way, Kirby also relates how southerners have thought about their part of Earth?as a source of both sustenance and delight.