Join us for the Grand Rapids Audubon Club’s Birdy Book Club, hosted at Books & Mortar, a locally owned, independent book store. On Monday, March 9, 2026, we’ll discuss “The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature,” by J. Drew Lanham
About the book:
Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center
Finalist for the John Burroughs Medal
“In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these 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 to 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”—to find joy and freedom in the same land his ancestors were tied to by forced labor, and then to be a black man in a profoundly white field.
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.
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About the club:
-Buy or borrow the book and complete the reading before the meeting. Get 10% off the price of the book if you purchase at Books & Mortar (mention it's for the GRAC Birdy Book Club!)
-There’s no cost to participate (apart from any books you opt to purchase). And you don't need to be a club member, or a birder, to join us for the discussion! We love meeting new people
-Book club meets 6 to 7 p.m. generally on the second Monday of every other month (January, March, May, July, September, November) except in the case of scheduling conflicts.
-Titles for the 2026 book club schedule (and past picks) are available on our website: https://www.graud.org/membershipmeetings-1
-This is a space for mutually respectful, curious and sometimes challenging conversations. Happy reading!