Eight stories capture the life of twelve-year-old Irene Hutto, growing up on a cotton farm in Texas in the 1930s, based on the life of Harriet Burandt's mother.

From the legendary author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a volume of essays on everything from primordial life and the mysteries of the brain to the ancient ginkgo and the power of the written word. "Magical . . . [Everything in Its Place] showcases the neurologist's infinitely curious mind."—People Magazine In this volume, Oliver Sacks examines the many passions that defined his life--both as a doctor engaged with the central questions of human existence and as a polymath conversant in all the sciences. Everything in Its Place brings together writings on a rich variety of topics. Why do humans need gardens? How, and when, does a physician tell his patient she has Alzheimer's? What is social media doing to our brains? In several of the compassionate case histories included here, we see Sacks consider the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia for the first time. In others, he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette's syndrome, aging, dementia, and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks's love of the natural world--and his final meditations on life in the twenty-first century.

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems. In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. “I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way 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.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

In this joyous reminiscence of a small-town boyhood in West Tennessee, Drake reflects upon his family's origins, flowering, and eventual decline, and ponders the meaning of their lives. It is a story with which many a Southerner who has grown up in twentieth-century America will readily identify. As a chronicle in microcosm of the gradual disintegration of the traditional extended family that has taken place all across the country in this turbulent century, it speaks to modern humankind everywhere.Drake concludes that the old tales about the home place were what held the family together long after the place itself was gone. The Drakes were rooted in the goodness of God and the joy of the Lord. The gift they had been given, a happiness based ultimately on love and joy in all God's creation, they in turn passed on to their family and all who came in contact with them.History and geography also helped give the Drakes their identities: they knew who they were because they knew where they were and when they were, with no alienation from either time or place. Their lives were thus whole and full. Their home, their family, their community were all very real entities, nourishing and sustaining the individual member while giving him a sense of belonging to something greater than himself. They gave order and meaning to his life.The times have changed, but who can say that the world of the Drakes is any less meaningful to us today? Perhaps the memories of that world constitute a rebuke to our frenetic lives. But perhaps the legacy of their lives, their times, and, above all, their great love, can still exert its healing power on modern generations.

"He wants to sit and visit at the kitchen table, and he can hardly wait to get on the road again." —From Chapter 1 Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's most important writers, was a fierce regionalist with a porous yet resilient sense of "home." Although his criticism and fiction have received extensive attention, his poetry remains underexplored. This exuberantly polyvocal text, insightfully written by dennis cooley—who knew Kroetsch and worked with him for decades—seeks to correct that imbalance. The Home Place offers a dazzling, playful, and intellectually complex conversation drawing together personal recollections, Kroetsch's archival materials, and the international body of Kroetsch scholarship. For literary scholars and anyone who appreciates Canadian literature, The Home Place will represent the standard critical evaluation of Kroetsch's poetry for years to come.

More than just a collection of stories and essays by beloved writer Robert Drake, For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader is an introduction to the craft and art of short story writing, as the stories are accompanied by analyses of Drake as a short story writer and essayist.

Eight stories capture the life of twelve-year-old Irene Hutto, growing up on a cotton farm in Texas in the 1930s, based on the life of Harriet Burandt's mother.

Growing up in Hickshaw has not been easy for Mave and Shirley. In a town with long-standing traditions and ideals, it is best to follow than rebel. In the place they called home, at least they always had their friendship. As unexpected challenges arise and come their way, will their friendship and relationships be able to survive the small-town world? As they travel on their journey, the two young women will find just how far they have to travel to find a true home of their own.