The Home Place
Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
"A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful."—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner
In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.
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, 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 meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
"When you're done with The Home Place, it won't be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous."—Star Tribune
"A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience."—National Geographic
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this heartfelt memoir, naturalist J. Drew Lanham strives to make the natural world a welcome place for fellow Black people—particularly in the South. Under the guidance of his grandmother, Lanham’s South Carolina childhood involved a lot of watching white-tailed deer traipsing through the kudzu. He followed his heart to study ornithology and forestry, turning his love for the natural world into a career. Still, it’s not always easy: In the powerful chapter “Birding While Black,” Lanham offers a stark reminder that in his rural-South homeland, even fellow nature lovers sometimes question why he’s out there. Also a published poet, Lanham tells his story in gorgeous language. The Home Place makes you contemplate nature in more ways than one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful personal narrative, Lanham, an ornithologist and professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, recalls his childhood in rural South Carolina and how it led him into such an overwhelmingly white field. Lanham grew up in the boondocks among pine trees and wild turkeys. His parents planted and sold "watermelon, cantaloupe, butter beans, purple-hull peas, and an array of other crops" to city and suburban folks to supplement their schoolteacher salaries. A curious and avid reader, Lanham pored over encyclopedias and saw field guides as "treasure troves of information: pictures joyously stacked side by side with brief descriptions of what, where, and when." When Lanham began bird-watching years later, he seldom encountered other African-Americans in the field carrying binoculars, and eventually realized how atypical a pastime it was for a black man. He was himself "the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water." He would like to see this incongruity eliminated. Encouraging readers to pay closer attention to nature, Lanham gathers the disparate elements that have shaped him into a nostalgic and fervent examination of home, family, nature, and community.
