Wild Spectacle - by Janisse Ray (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Janisse Ray at her best.... If there's a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I've not met her." -- Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

From the bestselling author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, an exploration of the astounding and vanishing wild world.

Book Synopsis

"Janisse Ray at her best.... If there's a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I've not met her." - Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

From the bestselling author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, an exploration of the astounding and vanishing wild world.

Review Quotes

Praise for Wild Spectacle

Georgia Center for the Book "Books All Georgians Should Read" for 2022

Atlanta Journal Constitution Top 10 Southern Books of 2021

Gun & Garden's Favorite Books of 2021

"A lover takes nothing for granted. A lover explores, wanders, takes delight in nuance. Says, viva la difference. A lover listens, savors, is patient. Janisse Ray is a writer in love with place and places." - Orion

"With its combination of lyrical sentences, heartfelt truths, and profound observations, this book is a gem and a worthy sequel to Cracker Childhood." -- Southern Literary Review

"Ray is more than a knowledgeable observer. Her relationship with the natural world is passionate and spiritual." -- Alabama Public Radio

"The essays in Wild Spectacle span 20 years...they show that no matter where or when we are, there's wonders to bear witness to." -- Savannah Morning News

"Just a small town girl traveling the whole world, Janisse Ray's new collection Wild Spectacle showcases her choice to take on heart-pounding adventure while discovering herself and nature." -- Connect Savannah

"Naturalist Janisse Ray's clear, nimble, sensitive writing about wildness and self-discovery is so arresting that it has informed my own writing." -- Latria Graham, Garden & Gun

"Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers Ray both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your soul." -- Dawn Major"An enthralling immersion into the splendor of our natural world told in language that is equal parts rapturous and down to earth." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"An enchanting essay collection about the wonders and lessons that nature provides." -- Foreword Reviews

"Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers Ray both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your soul." -- Dawn Major

"Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world and ourselves in it. Ray is the vortex around which everything spins." -- Joni Tevis, author of The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

"Wonderful. Janisse Ray has a heart the size of a manatee and the tenacity (and laugh) of a pileated woodpecker. She is incapable of not loving this world and all that is in it. If you don't yet know her work, today is your lucky day." -- Rick Bass, author of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

"Curious, humble, bright, and compelling. Whenever I read Janisse Ray, I come away feeling both moved and fortunate. She is one of America's best chroniclers of spiritual and physical wilderness. Her prose is as gorgeous as her mind is wise, and lands a necessary punch: how should a human enter a wild place?" -- Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women

"These seductive and diverse essays evoke wildness themselves, weaving narratives of community, love, and heroism. Ray writes with the heart of a poet and warrior, casting a spell that leaves us wanting to love and prote

About the Author

Janisse Ray is a naturalist and activist, and the author of seven books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River, and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nautilus Book Award, and numerous other honors. Ray lives on an organic farm near Savannah, Georgia