Customer Reviews

Sea Island Yankee (American Places of the Heart)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers a delightful walk through the south of the 1930's. The culture is penetrated through a child's uncluttered horizon. Coupled with a mature sifting of events this book offers wonderful insight into the healing, fragile and unique culture of Charleston. Wonderfully written, this book offers a charming notch of history.

I live on James Island, where Clyde Bresee's autobiographical story takes place. I expected it to be so-so, but have of late been determined to read anything that comes my way about James Island, so...well, what a real surprise. Deftly written, evoking a sense of place and time and people that is still part of the underlying fabric of the place and culture. Highly recommended.

Clyde Bresee does a wonderful, colorful job in this memoir of coming of age on a plantation on South Carolina's James Island. The simplicity of life as a boy exploring nature mixed with complex feelings and observations of race unfold as dancing prose. As a regular visitor of nearby Folly Island, this books allows one to travel the sea island as if you are there.

From the New York Times Book Review-- Mr. Bresee is a writer of distinction from whom we must hear more. His prose is transparent, supple and spare; he evokes unhurriedly the smells and textures of the Southern world of his boyhood; his account of the fading landed aristocracy his father worked among is both astringent and forgiving; he is honest in his own baffled hypocrisies over "color." Through the power of Mr. Bresee's writing we travel deep into the heart of a troubled culture and the "unexpected" ambiguous beauty of a childhood lived in it.

Describing the James Island Creek he played in as boy, Mr Bresee writes: "The tide was far out and we stood still for a few moments trying to see everything at once. To have this shoreline for a playground was almost unbelievable. This living, warm thing before us and a stream of moving water! The sloping plane of mud, popping in the hot sun; the black surface skimming with fiddler crabs that vanished like raindrops when we approached."

Those fiddler crabs vanished then -- but they are here, now, caught for us in the fragile but enduring net of langauge.--Andrew Harvey

From The Library Journal-- "Often humorous and even bittersweet, the book is a poignant reflection of the Southern customs, family life, school and race relations."

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer -- "Bresee's prose is cadanced and flowing...a moving look back at his formative years in an alien place."

This book reminds me of the simple qualities of my childhood, the small adventures and clear view of life are presented with the refreshing clarity of Dr. Bresee's writing

Clyde Bresee experience as a youth in the South gives us a view that is not shaped by the Southern Culture but comes through as an objective on looker that understood the plight of the slave and the free men. Plantation Life after cotton and war.Priceless.