Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Nature of Home\u3c/i\u3e By Lisa Knopp

In this collection of personal essays, Lisa Knopp creates a constellation of various nonfiction forms, including memoir, social and natural history, biography, and travel writing, around the central subject of home - what home is, how one might find it, what it means to be at home or away from home or homeless .... Brief lexicon entries, consisting of an OED definition of a particular word along with the writer\u27s musings on the word\u27s relation to her central subject, serve as interludes between each of the book\u27s twenty-two essays. The combination of lexicon entries and essays creates a rich and resonant dialectic: an entry on the word Citizen is paired with an essay concerning the politics of salt marsh reclamation; Heaven serves as a prelude to My Place of Many Times, an essay about the writer\u27s childhood home. The Nature of Home displays Knopp\u27s native gifts as an essayist, including her ability to take the most quotidian of momentsshucking soybeans on the back porch, braiding hair-and glean from them important insights about the ways we live. The most compelling part of the book, though, is the narrative account of the writer\u27s decision to leave a stable university teaching position and return with her two young children to southeastern Nebraska, the region she calls her belongingplace. In a culture that considers it commendable to leave home in order to stake a claim in the outside world, Knopp\u27s decision to defer her academic career in order to return to more familiar terrain comes across as a countercultural, even quietly subversive, resolution. The natural and social history of Nebraska and the Plains region figure prominently in the book. Knopp weaves research into her essays clearly and compellingly, rarely overwhelming her deeper points with facts. (She nicely models Phillip Lopate\u27s advice, offered in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, that an essayist graciously inform without humiliating or playing the pedantic schoolmaster. ) While her depiction of the region is generally fond, she isn\u27t afraid to look soberly at less praiseworthy aspects as well: The essay Witness provides an unflinching account of the evening an African American man is executed at the Nebraska State Penitentiary while a celebratory mob in the parking lot guzzles beer and waves racist signs. Knopp\u27s deep sense of connection to the region makes this cruel demonstration all the more painful and difficult for her to resolve, and provides a realization that deepens and complicates the writer\u27s understanding of her belonging-place