I loved hearing Drew read his own poetic words on the Audiobook. It was simply divine and added much more to the words on the page. Poetry needs to be read out loud and he blessed us with this treasure.

I felt like sitting with him by a campfire and listening to the stories of his upbringing and the humorous, racist, and spiritual experiences that influenced the extraordinary human being that he is today.

What Drew adds to the world of nature writing is the intimate knowledge of what being a Black man is like in open spaces that should belong to all, but are often not, and rarely told in pieces by others who cannot fathom or even empathize with this heartbreaking isolation.

I feel like I know him on a deeper level and that I am not alone with the struggles I encounter as a colored woman in the environmental/agricultural world. I'm definitely looking forward to his next (audio) books. ( )

I love birding memoirs. But this is so much more than a birding memoir. Lanham writes, "Being a birder in the United States means that you’re probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and therefore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker."

This book is about his love for nature, growing up in the US South, his heritage, his family, his family's attachment to their land, race in America, and so much more. It is a shame I had never heard of this book until Lanham received a MacArthur fellowship (aka "Genius Grant") earlier this year. This book deserves a much wider reading audience. Highly recommended for anyone interested in memoir, birding, US history, race relations, nature, etc.

( )

With a lyric yet plain spoken style, Lanham's memoir is a poignant tribute to nature complicated by a society's attempt to stereotype a black biologist. ( )

I love adjectives as much as anybody, and more than most. But there were times in Drew Lanham's mostly engaging and heartfelt memoir when I wanted to beg him to stop. That and the labored alliterative lists (yes, like that), and the similes (questions fly like dandelion fluff, trees grow thick as hair on a dog's back, bobolinks sing like discordant music boxes... though that last one is actually pretty good - they DO sound like that). It's a little like reading Faulkner or Proust - you just have to let the language roll on over you and try not to drown.

What's good are the stories he tells, of his childhood growing up on a 200-acre farm in the woods of rural South Carolina, of his indefatigable mother and father - both highly-educated schoolteachers who also raised cattle, grew their food, canned fruit, fixed what broke, cut timber for household heat, dug out the busted plumbing, and raised four kids - one of whom they handed over to Mamathia, the elderly grandmother living her own life in a nearby house known as "Ramshackle," because when her husband died, they thought she would be lonely. That kid was Drew, who absorbed botany from his herbalistically-inclined Mamathia, roamed the woods and fields and streams for hours and days on end, and wolfed down every meal she cooked for him on a woodburning stove. He was a good student, collecting field guides and learning the names of everything he saw (and they are beautiful names), and reading the encyclopedia from A to Z. There were also long, torturous hours in the church pew, as the preacher ranted and raved and scared everyone to death with hellfire and God's Big Brotherly eternal watchfulness for sin. A gentler, more educationally-minded preacher was ejected by the congregation, and Drew's parents never went back (to his great relief). It's a wonderfully observed, deeply loving portrait of a Black family and community in the rural South.

Smart Black kids like Drew went to college, steered into engineering or medicine where - a counselor told him - he'd make enough money to be able to keep on birdwatching as a hobby. He gutted it out for a while in engineering school, then ditched it for biology and never looked back. He followed his passion and it has worked out well for him professionally: field work, research, publishing, teaching, a respected faculty position at Clemson. The chapters here are thinner, more then-this-then-that, a wife appears, and then... surprise! A baby. His astonished confession that fatherhood hadn't even occurred to him is a bit disingenuous... really? You have graduate degrees in biology and zoology and your wife is a registered nurse, and neither of you considered, um, planning that somehow? The next kid, four years later, seems to be similarly surprising. Hmm.

It gets better again as he explores the experience of being a Black birder / naturalist / outdoorsman - a bird of a different color. A lone Black man roving the woods and back roads for no apparent reason (and once with a white female colleague in the vehicle) draws unwelcome and scary attention from some locals. He may be the only person of color at birding gatherings or conferences, and wishes it were not so, though he understands the reasons for it. As a boy he was enchanted by stories of cowboys - how wonderful to find out lots of them were brown like him! He wishes he had known sooner about the Masai, living in the wild lands of Africa with their cattle, amid leopards and lions and elephants. Alex Haley's ground-breaking TV series Roots captivates him; eventually, he conducts his own historical and genealogical researches, with poignant results.

Drew Lanham is also a hunter. Earlier on, he describes his day out with his brand-new Daisy rifle. He fires BB's at every tree, pinecone, fencepost, leaf... and finally a chipping sparrow, quietly preening itself on a branch. He acknowledges that yes, he wanted to shoot it, to kill it, and he did. He is then appalled, ashamed, heartsick - and we feel it too. A dapper, tiny, oblivious little chipping sparrow. But, I thought, wait, didn't he call himself a hunter in the introduction? Yep. And so in the chapter called "Jawbone," we get what seems to be the requisite rationalization, justification, and glorification of the deer kill. It is vivid, it feels honest, and it is quite horrible. He cheerfully describes the local men who hunt his Daddy's property - who seem to truly just enjoy being out there, whether they get a deer or not. (Begged question: then why don't they just do that and skip the killing part?) He disparages slob hunters who poach, who hunt just for trophies and leave the carcass to rot. But he climbs up into his deer stand in his camo, he sprinkles doe pheromones around, waits with his rifle for a huge, splendid, healthy adult buck (no thinning out the weak ones here), and kills it. And justifies it with the old crap about "honoring" the buck because he eats it and shares the meat with his family. I doubt the buck understood the honor being done him. I get that people hunt to put meat on the table. I get that people who blithely eat store-bought chicken and pork chops and sirloins from sentient, confined, unhealthy, suffering animals in industrial barns are ignoring a hideous truth. But so is he: he hunts because he likes it. And he should at least be as honest about that as he has mostly been throughout this book, instead of dressing it up in language about "honor" and thanking the buck for the gift of his existence (as if the buck had a choice), and the rather nauseating custom of smearing your first kill's blood on your face as "marking your soul."

At last, Lanham begins to turn his mind at an angle away from the data-driven, scientific observation of the natural world and its academic explication. He wants to to share his passion - his emotion, his heart - with others, and begins to write. He wants to teach others to notice, nurture, and care for this world that means so much to him. I think it's hard - especially at the beginning - to communicate such depth of emotion and knowledge without pulling out every writing trick in the bag to do it justice. Perhaps as he gains control of his voice and the universe of words available to him, he'll get closer using fewer of them, more carefully chosen - and, more ruthlessly, not chosen.

juliestielstra.com ( )

Honest, lyrical, and filled with the author's philosophy, learned from E. O. Wilson, "to notice, nurture, and care" for the land and all her beings. ( )