The Home Place

Nonfiction

The Home Place

Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
Winner of the Southern Book Prize

“Wise and beautiful.” —HELEN MACDONALD
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Winner of the 2017 Southern Book Prize
Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center

Finalist for the John Burroughs Medal
Named a “Best Scholarly Book of the Decade” by The Chronicle of Higher Education

“In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these 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 Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to 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”—to find joy and freedom in the same land his ancestors were tied to by forced labor, and then to be a black man in a profoundly white field.

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 South—and in America today.

Keywords: 
african American, American, autobiography, birds, black, childhood, conservation, Ecology, environment, families, family, generations, geography, growing up, history, identity, minority, natural, ornithologists, race, rural, scientists, small town, south, south carolina, southern, wildlife, world
ISBN:
9781571313508
Publish Date: 
06/13/2017
Pages: 
240
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.56 in
Weight: 
11.1 oz
Author

A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. He is a birder, naturalist, hunter-conservationist, and an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University.

Praise and Prizes

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Briana Gwin – 02/27/2023

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