Will I love The Home Place?

Like Rachel Carson, Lanham is a scientist who avoids the stilted style of his profession. His book was also a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal, and like Janisse Ray, he published with Milkweed Editions, a powerhouse publisher in environmental literature. As a black man and lover of nature, Lanham describes himself as an “unusually colored fish out of water.” Growing up in rural South Carolina, he was surrounded by woods and wetlands that beckoned his curiosity on solitary wanderings. Everything captivated him: insects, reptiles, rocks, plants, and, especially, birds. When baptized in his grandmother’s authoritarian religious faith, he questioned… show more.

Something very deep and very old struck me as I was reading the first pages of The Home Place, so much that it drew me out of the prose and into a state of contemplation. There was something resoundingly familiar about J. Drew Lantham’s writing, and it wasn’t until I was able to lay hands on it — literally, in the form of the yellowed pages of my copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac — that I was able to continue reading Lantham’s exquisite memoir. Creative but concrete, florid but exacting, Lantham is an ascendant heir to… show more.