Water Is Wide FROM THE PUBLISHER
The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence–unless, somehow, they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher.É
Here is PAT CONROY’S extraordinary drama based on his own experience–the true story of a man who gave a year of his life to an island and the new life its people gave him.
SYNOPSIS
A young schoolteacher struggles to bring literacy and selfrespect to a black backwoods South Carolina school in this affecting work. An early, semiautobiographical novel by the author of THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE and THE PRINCE OF TIDES Filmed, as CONRACK in 1974 by Martin Ritt with Jon Voight and Paul Winfield.
FROM THE CRITICS
AudioFile - Ted Hipple
Before he became a bestselling novelist, Pat Conroy spent a year teaching on virtually all-black Yamacraw Island, off the coast of South Carolina, where most of his students, grades five and up, were totally illiterate. This is the story of that experience, sometimes disturbing, often uplifting, always interesting. Doing the story considerable justice is reader Tom Stechschulte, who handles diverse Southernisms and Southerners with exceptional variety and skill. He ably portrays students who shout and others who mumble, subservient to (white) island residents, rednecks and Conroy himself. Stechschulteﾽs performance is so amazing that you may forget youﾽre listening to one narrator and think that a whole company is presenting a remarkable dramatization. T.H. ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine
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