New York Magazine‘s Vulture included Lauret Savoy‘s Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape in their monthly roundup of books to read this November.

November 4, 2015

7 Books You Need to Read This November

Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape, by Lauret Savoy (Counterpoint, November 10)

Savoy is a geologist at Mount Holyoke, but this sui generis creation, wherein John McPhee meets James Baldwin, dissolves all academic boundaries. Trace is a memoir, a meditation on landscape and identity, and a travelogue with a mission. “As an Earth historian,” writes Savoy, “I once sought the relics of deep time. To be an honest woman, I must trace other residues of hardness.” Digging for her family roots in America’s tripartite legacy — natives, African slaves, and European settlers — she unearths some genealogy, but more fruitful are the connections she makes between philosophy, ecology, and race.