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

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, 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.

• Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
• Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
• Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
• Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods
• Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: 15th Anniversary Edition
• The Solace of Open Spaces
• The Old Man Who Read Love Stories
• Into the Forest
• Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage