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Trace
Trace: A Journey Through Memory, History, and the American Land | Lauret Savoy
7 posts | 10 read | 8 to read
Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward herpaths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this landlie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of race, have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from Indian Territory and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital,Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories -- natural, personal, cultural -- to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. Every landscape is an accumulation, reads one epigraph. Life must be lived amidst that which was made before. Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memoryand to be one. Though deeply personal,Trace concerns who we all are in this terrain called the United States, inviting readers to have a more honest understanding of history's impact in our lives.
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Smarkies
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Bailedbailed

Bailing on this until I decide to get a physical copy as the audiobook narrator did not suit me 😑

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MargaretPinardAuthor
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Rearranging my natural found objects vase... seemed like it fit in with the theme of Trace, which I‘m finding more musing and memoirish than illuminating so far..
#moss #lichen #foundobjects

Texreader How cool!! 4y
31 likes1 stack add1 comment
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JSW
Pickpick

I'm a huge fan of books that transcend genre, as this does. Part memoir, part geographical discussion, part historical discourse on race and the movement/displacement/settling of people groups over time, fully all of the above, this book is a series of essays and thought trees that lead the reader on winding paths through important perspectives of America. Fascinating and graceful, tragic and timeless.

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ErinPringle
Mehso-so

Structurally similar to White Rage, Trace reads like a series of essays that don‘t fully predict where the next chapter will land. Probably useful for readers new to critiques of majority narratives and how those delete and render invisible minoritized people/experiences. Part travelogue, part nature writing, part memoir, and fully a critique of simplistic histories, Trace mixes many parts to examine the fragmentation of public and private memory.

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kspenmoll
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Crazeedi I picked Lila too! 4y
OriginalCyn620 👍🏻📚👍🏻 4y
77 likes2 comments
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merelybookish
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kspenmoll I started Trace a while back then got the Covid lull. I do want to read it 4y
56 likes1 comment
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DieselBookstore
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A beautifully written, enlightening journey which reveals so many of the historical particulars of our evolutions as a place and a people, this is a great book for anyone interested in family, ancestors, American culture, and how we each have come to be where and who we are.

3 likes2 stack adds