Publisher's Weekly Review
In reverential, elegiac prose, Savoy (The Colors of Nature), a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, meditates on the meaning of history and identity as related to place. Savoy's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were "free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and people indigenous to this land," and she has "long felt estranged from time and place, uncertain of where home lies." In trying to connect with her family's past, she travels to Oklahoma, where she was told some ancestors may have lived. She spends a day in the Black Heritage Center archives at Langston University, learning of early African-American homesteads, and visits the rural town of Boley, Okla., founded in 1903 on land owned by Creek Indian freedwoman Abigail Barnett. Though Savoy does not unearth any concrete evidence linking her mother's family to the area, she gains further appreciation for the lives people lived and the hardships they endured. Exploring her father's familial ties to Washington, D.C., Savoy contrasts the slavery-oriented history of that "invented place" with the enthusiastically mixed crowd she saw during the 2009 inauguration of President Obama. Savoy's deep knowledge of the land opens up intriguing new avenues for exploring the multifaceted, tumultuous nature of American identity. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An earth scientist explores the broad historical branches extending from her own roots. Many geologists limit their subjects of inquiry to the Earth, probing contours of the land to reveal how past developments have come to shape the present. In Savoy's (Environmental Studies and Geology/Mount Holyoke Coll.; co-author: The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, 2011, etc.) latest study, however, the quest of this self-described "Earth historian" begins closer to home. She traces her Native, African-, Euro-American ancestry across the United States in the hope of learning what her extended family experienced. The author's parents both served in the military during World War II, her father in the segregated Army Air Forces and her mother as a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps. Impelled by their reticence when recounting their experiences in different communities, Savoy retraces her parents' steps from Washington, D.C., to California, South Carolina, Arizona, and the Mexican borderland, searching in each destination for the muted historical realities of the marginalized. Along this trek, the author unearths unfathomable stories of racial discrimination and federally sanctioned hypocrisye.g., Charles Drew, the African-American physician who developed the blood bank, was fired when he tried to end the "government-approved" policy of segregating blood; African-American nurses in the ranks of the Army Nurse Corps experienced segregation when forced to serve where white nurses refused to. Savoy's well-researched account, which includes numerous lyric eyewitness descriptions of place, also delves into recently declassified National Archives records to note how prisoners of war "expressed to the nurses their surprise that Americans would fight to preserve democracy abroad and at home exhibit prejudice to other Americans solely because of their skin color." Springing from the literal Earth to metaphor, Savoy demonstrates the power of narrative to erase as easily as it reveals, yielding a provocative, eclectic expos of the palimpsest historically defining the U.S. as much as any natural or man-made boundary. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
What if written history bears no trace of our existence, our contribution to the land? What do these silences speak of and bear witness to? Savoy's illuminating treatise teases apart these questions as she traces her family's African American heritage, piecing together scant information about her ancestry from her mostly taciturn parents. As she travels around the U.S., visiting places Oklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, Washington, D.C. brushed by her family's genealogical tree, a clear commonality begins to emerge: the widely relayed picture of American history largely overlooks African American contributions to the shaping of the country. A professor of geology, Savoy also draws connections between heritage and the physical land, a crucial perspective even if these parallels are occasionally abstract and belabored. Each told fact holds meaning to the recorder, and each historical narrative (re)presents accidental and deliberate silences or omissions, Savoy writes. As she assuredly shows, these silences can be telling, reminding us to watch for bias, and that when it comes to interpreting history, the viewing lens is almost as important as the narrative.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2015 Booklist
Choice Review
Savoy's book is a brief but fascinating journey of self-discovery shaping a personally meaningful landscape constructed through the lens of race and culture. The author writes as a person of mixed race--Indigenous American, African American, and European American--and as a trained geologist, tracing her lineal past in the physical landscape as a means to write her own sense of self and place. As she writes in double entendre, "Our lives take place." Savoy (environmental studies, Mount Holyoke College) demonstrates how one traces geologic history from surficial fragments and remnants as analog for tracing multiple ancestral pasts, looking always to discover personally meaningful patterns. Her trace ranges across the US from her present home in New England to her familial homes in California and Washington, DC, to imagined or real hereditary homes in Southwestern landscapes, along the shores of Lake Superior, and in Piedmont South Carolina--always seeking "to uncover the strata of ... meaning shrouded in generations." She finds place-names especially critical fragments giving context to who used the land, when, and how. An important and fruitful work of creative nonfiction for all readers. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Joseph S. Wood, University of Baltimore
Library Journal Review
Savoy (environmental studies, geology, Mt. Holyoke Coll.; The Colors of Nature) successfully leads readers on an illuminating journey through history--her own and her ancestors', U.S. native and nonnative peoples', and the country's, via insights on varied American landscapes and cultural and personal narratives. The San Pedro Valley, Madeline Island on Michigan's Lake Superior, the Cimarron River, Washington, DC, and more backdrop chapters addressing historic themes such as racism and slavery, migration and displacement, societal and geographical transitions, etc. The author challenges readers to consider ethical, social, and environmental issues such as broken tribal agreements, the impact and meaning of changed geographical names, and the "human costs" of displacement, loss, and labor when discussing ecological footprints. VERDICT Savoy's immersive, accessible, and evocative narrative interweaves questions of morality, social justice, and stewardship of the land we call home with discussions of history and the American landscape and will interest readers of history, social science, and earth science.--Jennifer Harris, Southern New Hampshire Univ. Lib., -Manchester © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.