The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

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From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolinaa place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity." By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural Southand in America today.

Reviews

Foreword Reviews Best Book of 2016 and Nautilus Silver Award Winner

Praise for The Home Place

A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature, selfhood, and the nature of home. It is thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful. I want everyone to read it.Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

Consider The Home Place required readingits a thoughtful and relevant-as-ever look at race and identity in the great outdoors.Outside

A lyrical story about the power of the wild, The Home Place synthesizes J. Drew Lanhams own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.National Geographic

"By surrendering the world to imperial and industrial standards, we chop away at the very surroundings that allow us to live. Yet the dominant common sense asks us to divide our loyalties: Either we support racial justice or we support the environment. There can be no more important task in the world today than to upend this rotten dichotomy, to heal the manufactured rift between environmentalism and the fight for social justice. Lanham's memoir'a colored man's love affair with nature'offers us one way to begin." Chronicle of Higher Education, "Best Scholarly Books of the Decade"

When youre done withThe Home Place, it wont be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous. You might find yourself hoping for a world where every family has a J. Drew Lanham in it.Minneapolis Star Tribune

A beautifully rendered and deeply personal story of the complex geographies of home, and displacement . . .The Home Placeis a deft examination of how we come to define ourselves in a world that, in turn, is relentlessly trying to define who we areand how we can take those definitions over and make our own.Sierra

There are no fireworks heresimply the musings of an African-American naturalist who, throughout his lifetime, has trained himself to marvel at the minor. Trust me, that is enough. . . . Of the many powerful lessons J. Drew Lanham bestows upon readers, perhaps this last one is his best: proof that human nature, like Mother nature herself, can still surprise us with its grace.Los Angeles Review of Books

"J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place is a stunning read, a masterpiece, a soft rebellion that touches the deepest of our instincts." Marine Ornithology

An extraordinary and trailblazing perspective on nature and race, told by a southern black man who became a natural scientist and a bird watcher. J. Drew Lanhams colorful and long-awaited memoir deeply enriches our understanding of American culture and the environmental movement, rising as it does from the silence of an entire people. This is a captivating and crucial biology and a volume that I'll proudly add to my bookshelf.Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Wisdom and generosity fill the pages ofThe Home Place.This memoir and story of a familial ecosystem is anchored firmly in the Piedmont clay of South Carolina that J. DrewLanham'senslaved ancestors worked and would later come to ownand love.A man born of forests and fields, Lanham thinks deeply about the land writ large and our connections to it as well as to each other.His honest and insistent words encourage us to cultivate a broader, deeper perspective that recognizes ties between race and environmentin deliberate ways.Lauret Savoy, author of Trace

The Home Placeteems with lifenotably the authors own remarkable one. This wise and deeply felt memoir of a black naturalists improbable journey travels the hallways of academia, the fields and forests of ornithological study, and the dusty clay roads of the rural south where it all began with grace, humility, and an abiding appreciation for this exquisite world.William Souder, author of Under a Wild Sky

Your world will change while reading this beautiful, deep, and generous book. A book by a scientist that goes far beyond science, a book by a black man that looks issues of race in the eye but then transcends them, a book by a loving son who, in the end, finds a new identity,The Home Placeis really about what it means to be human, and in particular what it means to be human in relationship to the land. It is a love song to family, soil, trees, birds, and wildness itself. Read it and be enlarged.David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains

Rapturous and illuminating . . . A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the authors native South.Kirkus

Insightful . . . Encouraging readers to pay closer attention to nature, J. Drew Lanham gathers the disparate elements that have shaped him into a nostalgic and fervent examination of home, family, nature, and community.Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author ofThe Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Mans Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. Most recently, he is the author ofSparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts.He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications includingOrion,Audubon,Flycatcher, andWilderness,and in several anthologies, includingThe Colors of Nature,State of the Heart,Bartrams Living Legacy, andCarolina Writers at Home. Lanhamis a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawks downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.