Trace

Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

De: Lauret Savoy

Narrado por: Allyson Johnson

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.

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 US-Mexico Border to the US 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.

©2015 Lauret Edith Savoy (P)2018 Tantor

Amazing!

Ms. Johnson's performance was spot on! Great story that flows together well! Lauret is now on my favorite authors' list!

Landscape entwined in race and memory

Really enjoyed this book. I thought it was a really well researched investigation into sides of the American landscape that we don’t consider. The perils and pitfalls of our past live still in the names and very designs of places. The audiobook does not have chapter titles. So it was a little hard to keep up with how they all worked together. Sometimes I was not sure what kind of a book I was reading—memoir, scholarly, etc. The narrator was really great. But I will say she did something that I detest which is drifting in and out of accents to color character voices: from Russian, to British English, to southern black, to child. I am not sure why someone would make a choice to do that and place the subject into caricature. Otherwise, her voice and her reading was fantastic.

Complexity of America

I enjoyed the solid historical review of all the places in America, where the main narrative of Americans is very biased towards white America. And how that story still is the diameter narrative. A very incomplete narrative.

Narrator sounded like a computer

The narrator sounded like a computer. While the book is good, having a narrator without a natural cadence to tell the story was terrible.