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

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 [his] 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. (Sept.)

This review was updated to reflect the correct distributor for Milkweed.