Drifting into Darien

I found this book important, evocative, and lovingly written. There are many passages of great beauty, and the author's sincerity and knowledge radiate from every page. Her words sing, crackle, and tingle in the mind long afterward. The book offers a rich blend of local color, universal insight, humor, and environmental passion.

* author of The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City *

Every endangered ecosystem should have such an eloquent spokesman.

Janisse Ray is, and has always been, the real authentic deal. She feels deeply about the land, the water, the life of this planet. She lives that conviction. And she is blessed with the gift to write about this earth in a way that touches us all. From one Georgia girl to another: Janisse, you and your work inspire me. Read her words. Be inspired.

* Novelist, Baby of the Family, Ugly Ways, Taking After Mudear *

Other rivers are as storied, as well-loved, and as wild, writes Georgia poet and activist Janisse Ray, 'But the Altamaha is mine.' In this wonderfully fearless narrative, Ray takes her readers into the haunts of giant catfish and rare trees. Enormous blackberries picked in the Altamaha’s swamps, and cancer clusters that include close relations who live near a nuclear power plant, illustrate as never before the link between body and place. In the generously personal prose we count on from Janisse Ray, we are renewed by stories of people who have begun to 'reconcile themselves with their landscape, with their home, and with each other.' And we see how, as they do, Georgia’s irreplaceable 137-mile 'Little Amazon,' also begins to win.

* author of Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites *

In Ray’s Drifting into Darien readers will feel the poetic beauty enjoyment, and power of paddling in Georgia’s Altamaha River.

* McCormick Messenger *

An idiosyncratic and passionate book, Drifting Into Darien is Ray’s own call to the river—something between a poem and a prayer, a sermon and a scientific study, a memoir and a field journal. Opening with a week-long kayak trip made with a group of people in memory of the old rafting crews that floated logs down river several generations earlier (when there was still longleaf pine forest to cut), Ray mixes memories with modern-day observations and insight, and becomes a shaman and guide to the reader.

* BiblioBuffet *

Ray, who danced nature writing into new and fertile terrain with An Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, introduces readers to one of the glories of the South, the Altamaha River. . . . Ray's encompassing, gracefully informative homage to what the Nature Conservancy has designated as one of the '75 Last Great Places' in the world is ecstatic and incensed.

Ray has produced an entertaining and provocative work with vivid descriptions. The book leads readers into thinking about their interactions with the world around them as it provides rich historical and cultural insight into this remarkable geographical feature. It also presents a compelling argument for preservation as opposed to greed.