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Review: "The Home Place..."

8/21/2023

 
By Veena Deo, Library Committee

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
by J. Drew Lanham (Milkweed Editions, 2017)

Joseph Drew Lanham is an African American ornithologist and a wildlife biologist who currently holds the Alumni Distinguished Professor Chair at Clemson University.  He is a writer, a poet, a scientist, a hunter, and a conservationist worth reading because his memoir surprises us in ways we least expect. 

​His writing is wonderfully poetic and informed with great passion for the land his ancestors lived and worked on as well as with a drive for environmental justice. In this book, readers meet extraordinary people in his family including the writer. However, it is not just a memoir, but also an account of a whole ecosystem told with responsibility and a desire to leave the wild spaces for future generations and non-human inhabitants of the land, rather than treat the land as an economic resource to be bought and sold for profit.

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“Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing--The Wiz,” is the epigram that begins Lanham’s meditation on his homeplace, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else,” which has been home to generations of white and black Lanhams from the time of slavery. To love this land where he could not find his first black ancestor’s grave in a cemetery full of white Lanhams, takes a deliberate effort to turn away from ideas of Africa as the motherland which many people of African descent have glorified to emotionally survive their ancestral trauma.
 
Instead, Drew Lanham tells us, “I’m a man of color—African American by politically correct convention…. In me there’s additionally an inkling of Irish, a bit of Brit, a smidgen of Scandinavian, and some American Indian, Asian, and Neanderthal tossed in, too…. There is also the red of miry clay, plowed up and planted to pass a legacy forward. There is the brown of spring floods rushing over a Savannah River shoal. There is gold of ripening tobacco drying in the heat of summer’s last breath. There are endless rows of cotton’s cloudy white. My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are in me; I am, in the deepest sense colored.” This sample of his voice suggests a writer who uses language with attention to its expressive power in both its literal as well as metaphoric elements.
 
Winner of the 2017 Southern Book Prize, Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and named a “Best Scholarly Book of the Decade” by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Drew Lanham’s book is definitely an inspiring read for us all.

Book Fest Extends Hours

8/6/2023

 
By Carol Van Why, Library  Cochair, originally published in the August 2023 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

Book Fest returns to the Social Room on September 28 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm. That should allow folks who work away from Coffman to attend. Air purifiers will be in use, and doors and windows will be open where needed. Masks are optional.

View over 50 newly acquired books. Pick up a copy of the 2023 edition of our “Catalog of Exhibited Books.” We won’t loan books during the event so you’ll be able to browse all of them. You will be able to indicate which of them you’d be interested in borrowing. We’ll do our best to sign one out to you within twenty-four hours.

Again this year there’ll be a drawing for a number of desirable door prizes. The drawing will begin at 4:30 pm. You needn’t be present; we’ll let you know if you’re a winner.   ​
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Next time you’re in the library make a point of visiting the expanded Mystery/Spy section. These are some of the library’s most popular books and they deserved more space. Now there are six additional shelves dedicated to mysteries. Look for the temporary sign pointing you to these new shelves.

Eileen Smith has now inventoried all of our Mystery/Spy and Fiction books. By the time you read this, nearly 75% of Coffman’s entire collection will have been inventoried.

Audrey Estebo recently reported that residents have already this year borrowed 635 library items. This pace puts the library on target to loan as many items as it did during the COVID lockdown year of 2020!

Nearly as popular as the library itself is our surplus book sales operation. Thanks to Audrey Estebo’s and Scott Magnuson’s stewardship and your support, last year’s sales were nearly equivalent to the library’s annual Coffman appropriation. 

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  • Home
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      • Resident Absence
      • Accident Form
      • Room Reservations >
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        • Guest Room Reservations
        • Other Room Reservations
    • Maintenance >
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      • Trash
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    • Operational Documents >
      • 2024 Reserve Study
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      • ad hoc HVAC Committee
      • Social Room Update
      • Garden >
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  • Library
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    • Recommended Reading >
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    • Book Night >
      • Book Night Archive
    • Donating Books
  • Available Units
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    • Condos for Sale
    • Floor Plans
  • Contact