From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emergesThe 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. InThe 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 Placeis 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.
Foreword ReviewsBest Book of 2016 and Nautilus Silver Award Winner
Praise forThe 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 ofH Is for Hawk
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 ofEcology of a Cracker Childhood
Wisdom and generosity fill the pages of?The Home Place.?This memoir and story of a familial ecosystem is anchored firmly in the Piedmont clay of South Carolina that J. Drew?Lanham's?enslaved ancestors worked and woul³J
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