"There was so much space."
These words epitomize ecologist Joe Truett's boyhood memories of the Angelina River valley in East Texas. Years and miles later, back home for the funeral of his grandfather, Truett began a long meditation on the world Corbett Graham had known and he himself had glimpsed, a now-vanished world where hogs and countless other animals rustled through the leaves rustled through the leaves, cows ate pinewoods grass instead of corn, oaks and hickories and longleaf pines were untouched by the corporate ax, and the river flowed freely. Truett's meditation resulted in this clear-sighted portrait of a place over time, its layers revealed by his love and care and curiosity.
Truett celebrates his family's heritage and the unspoiled natural world of the Piney Woods without nostalgia. He recreates an older, simpler, more worthy age, but he knows that we have lost touch with it because we wanted to: he laments the loss but understands it. What makes his prose so moving and so redeeming is this precise combination of honesty and sorrow, overlaid by a quiet passion for both the natural and the human worlds.
"Joe Truett has given us a tenderly ironic meditation on time and place, land and home, set in the East Texas countryside of his youth. Because his is as fine a writer as he is an ecologist, his stories will resonate for readers far beyond his native ground." - William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Proffesor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Wisonsin-Madison
"Circling Back is more than a family memoir. Truett takes us back to East Texas antiquity on the trails in the time of the mammoth hunters following the great beasts in the Angelina valley, then forward to the Caddos and the Spanish, always in search of the lost Eden of his childhood and his imagination. He ends his odyssey with the hope that the power of life's resurrection will overcome our careless stewardship." - F.E. Abernathy, Stephen F. Austin State University
