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The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham: book review



The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2016) is a memoir, set in Edgefield, South Carolina, in America, with ‘an incredible natural wealth of mountain, piedmont, and coastal plain.’ 

The author is an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, wilding, college professor, and an African American: ‘appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, and unusually colored fish out of water.’

 

Lanham separates the book into three sections: Flock (family and heritage), Fledgling (learning about birds), and Flight (work).

 

He writes beautifully of loblolly pines, bobwhite quail, and crookneck squash, where ‘nature hangs on by tooth, talon, and tendril.’ He writes fondly of his family, from his grandmother Mamatha (born Ethel in 1896), to his parents (James and Willie May), big brother Jock, older sister Julia, and younger sister Jennifer. It was Mamatha’s house that was the ‘heart of the Home Place’ which this whole book is about. Their lives were ‘painted on a canvas of Home Place forest and field.’ 

 

And along comes Janice, Alexis and Colby – his wife and children. 

 

I liked the third section, Flight, a lot. Here, the true bird researcher is in full flight. Lanham could have been an engineer or a physician, but he’s researching the eastern bluebird. 

 

And there’s danger in that – a black man in the remote wilderness, or anywhere, with binoculars. And sometimes at night. He is in danger, not from animals, but from white people who view his activities as suspicious or intrusive. 

 

Fortunately, he carries on – into the longleaf and wire grass woodland. He writes about his heritage and finishes with a family reunion.

 

Frank, honest, open, appealing, poignant, fascinating, and written by a scientist with passion, pride, and a deep sense of conviction. He brings nature and family together, demonstrating how they both nurture the soul.  









MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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