Saturday Review: “The Lands that Shape Us” a review by Evan Peter Smith in NCLR Online Winter 2025 of Georgann Eubanks’ Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction (2021) and Bland Simpson’s North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky (2021)
Smith tackles the review of two incredible writings at once and uses this to compare and contrast them both. Smith writes about how they “are careful meditations on a particular place,” and “these are books that feel destined to be savored and preserved, so that decades from now, a young reader might pluck them off a bookshelf and flip through their pages, discovering yet again what rich literary output this state has to offer.”
Staring off with careful combing of Saving the Wild South Smith puts forth a great statement, “readers might be surprised to learn that this book, despite its bounty of botanical information, is not really a book about plants at all. It is a book about people.”
There is a genuine care and love here that Smith shares with the reader, “there are whole communities of people who have made it their mission to safeguard these plants.” These people are what truly shine through as they are “diverse as the plants themselves, spanning different generations, races, cultural backgrounds, religions and scientific training, but all share a unique sense of ownership over the place Eubanks has dubbed the ‘Wild South.’”
Smith then says author Bland Simpson gives an “impressionistic counterpoint in his deceptively experimental new book.”
“Ostensibly a travelogue, it is made up of vignettes that examine specific places and regions of North Carolina, from its inlets and swamps, to its foggy hills and mountains, to its ancient old growth forests, with plenty of pitstops at old diners and barbecue joints and historic churches along the way,” Smith writes.
This still scratches the surface of the detail Smith gives on the two books and there is much more to read and uncover.
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2025 issue. To order: Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction and North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky both available at UNC Press
