The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
"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." From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology 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, 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 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.
Customer Reviews
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature Mentions in Our Blog
Our current circumstances have a lot of people talking about the Nordic tradition known as friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv). Translated as open air life, it is the idea of spending as much time outdoors as possible, no matter the weather. So get on out there!
For many of us Earth Day is a holiday that might involve a hike in our favorite state park or a visit to a nearby beach. But in the time of Covid-19, this may not be possible. If you're feeling housebound and looking for a way to experience nature, here are some great earthy reads for all ages.
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
