BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy by Katherine Clark
In 1972 as fate would have it my wife and I first encountered Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, on the maiden voyage of our dream boat Dursmirg. This was one of the Sea Islands with no bridge or telephone and had just gotten electric. The population was 85 and eleven were white. Pat Conroy had just been there, written his controversial book The Water is Wide and monumental change was about to change this place forever.
It was an enchanting place still locked in a forgotten century with more ox carts than automobiles.
We fell in love with the place and even wrote a book about it, Sailing the Sea Islands: Travels of Dursmirg.
We were so very lucky to to find this once in a lifetime place and the timing was right.
This biographical story of Pat Conroy is a classic and a real gem...we loved it!
Excerpts:
When someone once asked him why he collaborated with me on this book, Conroy replied, “My vanity got the better of my false modesty.” Although I love that response, I believe he was being—as usual—comically self-deprecating. A more serious and true answer to that question can be found I think in The Lords of Discipline, when the protagonist Will McLean reacts to the cruelties and injustices he experiences by vowing to himself: “I shall bear witness against them.” Conroy himself suffered cruelties and injustices throughout his life, from the time he was a child beaten by a violent and abusive father. The man who emerged from the crucible of chronic trauma was a warrior of words, determined to bear witness to the wrongs inflicted on the innocent and vulnerable by the corrupt and powerful. Pat Conroy never stopped being such a warrior, never ceased in his mission to bear witness against all kinds of evil, both individual and institutional.
There was a time when I had blood surging through my veins, when I was young and could not do enough good for the world. So Bernie and I applied to the Peace Corps. When we never heard from that, Bernie found out about this job on Daufuskie Island.
It was the first year of teacher integration, and the county was in a bind. They needed some white schoolteachers on this all-black island, which had two black teachers there already. So Bernie said, “Pat, why don’t you and I go over, rent a house and live there?
In the world of literature I don’t like bindings; I don’t like handcuffs; I don’t like readers who point and say you cannot go there; you are not allowed to go.
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