Formerly a URJ Press title. Why did generations of people grow up thinking that Jews really had horns? Did Eve really eat an apple, and if not, why does everyone think she did? Did Noah s ark really exist? Did Moses really write the Torah? This fascinating book explores these and many other assumptions about Jews and Judaism. Rabbi Sonsino uses history, archeology, and other scholarship to debunk familiar myths, showing how and why they developed over time. This book is for everyone who wants to know more about Judaism and get the real story behind the myth.

The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Ray, Janisse

Gardening & Landscape Design

Chelsea Green Publishing

Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Janisse Ray was a babe in arms when a boat of her father’s construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River. Tucked in a life preserver, she washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows. The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodiversity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the world’s last great places. The Altamaha is Ray’s river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. Drifting into Darien begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to meditations on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now. Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates “a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature.” She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radford’s mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.

History

Americas

University of Georgia Press

Formed by the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers, the Altamaha is the largest free-flowing river on the East Coast and drains its third-largest watershed. It has been designated as one of the Nature Conservancy’s seventy-five Last Great Places because of its unique character and rich natural diversity. In evocative photography and elegant prose, Altamaha captures the distinctive beauty of this river and offers a portrait of the man who has become its improbable guardian. Few people know the Altamaha better than James Holland. Raised in Cochran, Georgia, Holland spent years on the river fishing, hunting, and working its coastal reaches as a commercial crabber. Witnessing a steady decline in blue crab stocks, Holland doggedly began to educate himself on the area’s environmental and political issues, reaching a deep conviction that the only way to preserve the way of life he loved was to protect the river and its watershed. In 1999, he began serving as the first Altamaha Riverkeeper, finding new purpose in protecting the river and raising awareness about its plight with people in his community and beyond. At first Holland used photography to document pollution and abuse, but as he came to appreciate and understand the Altamaha in new ways, his photographs evolved, focusing more on the natural beauty he fought to save. More than 230 color photographs capture the area’s majestic landscapes and stunning natural diversity, including a generous selection of some the 234 species of rare plants and animals in the region. In their essays, Janisse Ray offers a profile of Holland’s transformation from orphan and troubled high school dropout to river advocate, and Dorinda G. Dallmeyer celebrates the biological richness and cultural heritage that the Altamaha offers to all Georgians.

Altamaha: A River and Its Keeper (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Arts & Photography

Dallmeyer, Dorinda G.

Photography & Video

Janisse Ray was a babe in arms when a boat of her father’s construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River. Tucked in a life preserver, she washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows.
The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodiversity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the world’s last great places.
The Altamaha is Ray’s river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. Drifting into Darien begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to meditations on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now.
Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates “a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature.” She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radford’s mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.

Science & Math

Earth Sciences

Thirty leading naturalists and writers survey the fabulous geographies of north Florida's Gulf Coast and the Red Hills of southwest Georgia.

Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf

Cerulean, Susan

Newton, Laura

Heart of the Earth

Chronicles the author's childhood in the rural forests of Georgia, her fundamentalist upbringing, and her battle to save the longleaf pine ecosystem of Florida and Georgia.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths. "Suffused with the same history-haunted sense of loss that imprints so much of the South and its literature. What sets Ecology of a Cracker Childhood apart is the ambitious and arresting mission implied in its title. . . . Heartfelt and refreshing." - The New York Times Book Review.

ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home)

Professionals & Academics

Chronicles the author's return to her grandmother's northern Appling County, Georgia farm and offers stories of the community and longleaf pine ecosystem she left seventeen years ago, and the changes she found upon her return.

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (The World As Home)

Arts & Literature

Seventeen years after she'd left home "for good," Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home. For Ray, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place — of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. Ray works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware store, and struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place.

Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home (The World As Home)

”A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty.” Kirkus Reviews (STARRED) From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and fight for the places they love. This edition, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the original publication, updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope. Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: 15th Anniversary Edition

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ray, Janisse. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ray, Janisse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ray, Janisse. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Altamaha: A River and Its Keeper (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home)

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (The World As Home)

Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home (The World As Home)

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: 15th Anniversary Edition