Angels by the River A Memoir Author:James Gustave Speth In Angels by the River, James Gustave "Gus" Speth recounts his unlikely path from a southern boyhood through his years as one of the nation's most influential mainstream environmentalists and eventually to the system-changing activism that shapes his current work. Born and raised in a lovely but racially divided town that later became the scene ... more »of South Carolina's horrific Orangeburg Massacre, Speth explores how the civil rights movement and the South's agrarian roots influenced his academic career when he "went North" to Yale University and Yale Law School in the 1960s, as well as during the heyday of the environmental movement, when he helped launch two landmark and influential environmental groups?the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute. Yet, in the end, he arrived somewhere quite unexpected-still believing change is possible, but not within the current political and economic system. Throughout this compelling memoir, Speth intertwines three stories?his own, his hometown's, and his country's-focusing mainly on his early years and the lessons he drew from them, and his later years, in which he comes full circle in applying those lessons. In the process he invites others to join him politically at or near the place at which he has arrived, wherever they may have started. « less