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    The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
    The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
    The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
    Audiobook6 hours

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

    Written by J. Drew Lanham

    Narrated by J. Drew Lanham

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    About this audiobook

    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 Carolina-a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"-has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners 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 South-and in America today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 5, 2019
    ISBN9781977338143
    Author

    J. Drew Lanham

    J. Drew Lanham is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature. He has received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity). He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022. He is a bird watcher, poet, and Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina. 

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    Reviews for The Home Place

    4/5

    59 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      We listened to this on a road trip to go camping, and Dr. Lanham's descriptions of nature and the home place where he grew up in South Carolina were the perfect set up for our trip. I really enjoyed this memoir of family, growing up in a small homestead, and becoming enamored with flight, birds, and nature. The author does describe hunting in one chapter and why he thinks it is important, which I know might upset some environmentalists (as he knows as well).
    • 5/5
      To use a tired cliche but that is so true, this book was written with warmth and grace. I felt like I knew and could almost see the people and the land that he grew up with. Extremely well written, I was very sorry for it to end. The stewardship of the land by his family living on their small farm where he grew up gives an example of how rural land can and should be used.
    • 4/5
      With a lyric yet plain spoken style, Lanham's memoir is a poignant tribute to nature complicated by a society's attempt to stereotype a black biologist.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book read by the author and look forward to reading more of his work.
    • 5/5
      Honest, lyrical, and filled with the author's philosophy, learned from E. O. Wilson, "to notice, nurture, and care" for the land and all her beings.
    • 4/5
      “I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict, consuming everything that the outdoors offers its all-you-can-sense, seasonal buffet. I am a wildling, born of forests and fields and more comfortable on unpaved back roads and winding woodland paths than in any place where concrete, asphalt, and crowds prevail.” “Being a birder in the United States means that you're probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and there fore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker.”“I've expanded the walls of my spiritual existence beyond the pews and pulpit to include longleaf savannas, salt marshes, cove forests, and tall-grass prairie. The miracles for me are in migratory journeys and moonlit nights. Swan song is sacred. Nature seems worthy of worship.”I had not heard of Professor Lanham before reading this solid memoir, which is a bit surprising since I am a fellow birder, nature-lover and avid reader. Regardless, I enjoyed following his history, growing up in rural southwestern South Carolina. His family were farmers and this where he learned to love the outdoors and respect hard work. He also witnessed the racism that ravaged the south in the 1960s and this also shaped the man he became. He also turned out to be an accomplished writer and poet. My only quibble was, I would have liked more of his birding life. I felt short-changed.