Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. By Jack Temple Kirby. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2006. Pp. [xxii], 361. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3057-4.)

Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South is a historical analysis of the environmental transformation of the American South from earliest times to the present. It is also a lament for a land disfigured by floods and hurricanes, soil erosion, the ravages of the plantation and tenancy, the pollution from a vast hog and broiler industry, and the poisoned watersheds of recently suburbanized southern states like Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. For Jack Temple Kirby, the important point ...