The Home Place

“[Drew Lanham’s] way of seeing and hearing and noticing the present, and the history, that birds traverse —through our backyards and beyond — is a revelatory way to be present to the world and to life in our time.”

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

“One of the most moving memoirs about place I have read … Reading The Home Place, I knew I was in the presence of not just a writer; this is the careful work of a brilliant professor and scientist, a keen observer, a willful wanderer. This is an important book that grapples with race relations and Blackness in America, and allows us to consider who this ‘place’ truly belongs to.”

“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.”

“An extraordinary and trailblazing perspective on nature and race. J. Drew Lanham’s 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 I’ll proudly add to my bookshelf.”

“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 would later come to own—and love. His honest and insistent words encourage us to cultivate a broader, deeper perspective that recognizes ties between race and environment in deliberate ways.”

“Through his observations of loblollies and church sermons, vireos and southerners, [Lanham’s] writing style fosters integration by drawing together the narratives of slavery and conservation and the languages of science and literature. The Home Place thus supports a promising shift in an age-old dialogue increasingly aware of diversity’s role in propagating holistic communities and resilient ecosystems.”

“To see and imagine more brown bodies, I am grateful for The Home Place. Lanham is a birdwatcher extraordinaire and I was mesmerized by his graceful descriptions of a world that seemed (all too frequently) to be lacking something like grace. I was particularly moved by his examining of what it means to be ‘the rare bird, the oddity’ of a brown person who loves to examine nature up close.”