The Home Place, J. Drew Lanham
The Home Place, J. Drew Lanham
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

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

Author: J. Drew Lanham

Narrator: J. Drew Lanham

Unabridged: 6 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/05/2019


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Scott on June 28, 2016

Perhaps the most monumental book I've read or reviewed about race relations in America. Lanham, a black naturalist, birder, and professor, shares his fond memories of his beloved family ranch in South Carolina. His land ethic, stemming from Leopold, Carson, and other conservationist luminaries, is u......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on February 20, 2023

One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.......more

Goodreads review by Tama on November 22, 2016

As a teen and twenty-something I read loads of great nature writing from the 50s and 60s, and Lanham's style is definitely reminiscent of those years. I woke early this morning just to read before I went to work, and now I can't wait until the day is done so I can pick up that book again A gorgeous,......more

Goodreads review by Julie on February 09, 2021

I love adjectives as much as anybody, and more than most. But there were times in Drew Lanham's mostly engaging and heartfelt memoir when I wanted to beg him to stop. That and the labored alliterative lists (yes, like that), and the similes (questions fly like dandelion fluff, trees grow thick as ha......more

Goodreads review by Emma on April 15, 2018

The content of this book is fascinating and crucial in the white-dominated field of environmental studies. Lanham focuses on his upbringing in a farm in South Carolina, the "Home Place," exploring how his connection to the land directed the course of his future and was complicated by the past (read:......more