Synopses & Reviews
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 her — paths of free and
enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this
land — lie largely eroded and lost.
A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and
across time, 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.
Review
"In reverential, elegiac prose, Savoy…meditates on the meaning of history and identity as related to place….Savoy’s deep knowledge of the land opens up intriguing new avenues for exploring the multifaceted, tumultuous nature of American identity." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Savoy demonstrates the power of narrative to erase as easily as it reveals, yielding a provocative, eclectic exposé of the palimpsest historically defining the U.S. as much as any natural or man-made boundary." Kirkus
Review
"Savoy is a geologist at Mount Holyoke, but this sui generis creation, wherein John McPhee meets James Baldwin, dissolves all academic boundaries." Vulture
Review
"This is not a book to be read quickly…her images are often poetic and her personal revelations can be striking…the close read is worth the effort." Boston Globe
Review
"I stand in awe of Lauret Savoy's wisdom and compassionate intelligence. Trace is a crucial book for our time, a bound sanity, not a forgiveness, but a reckoning." Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
About the Author
Lauret Savoy is a woman of mixed heritage, and a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, where she explores the intertwinings of natural and cultural histories. She writes about the stories we tell of the origins of the American land and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her 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, MA.