Horry and the Waccamaw

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this vivid account of a six-day, 150-mile canoe trip he made in 1985 on the Waccamaw River in his South Carolina stomping ground of Horry County, Burroughs ( Billy Watson's Croker Sack ) offers more than a paddle through shallow water. Discoursing on the region's history and culture, he portrays an area, defined largely by its backwater topography of swampland and piney woods, that produced a separate variety of Southern culture marked by independence, simplicity and a Huck Finn kind of poverty. Following in the wake of his inspiration, Nathaniel Holmes Bishop's The Voice of the Paper Canoe (1878), Burroughs tries to find the old culture on a rapidly changing riverside. Sketches of skilled backwoodsman Thomas Spivey, persevering writer/planter Elizabeth Alston Pringle and others met along the way are charming and revealing. This is a jewel of a book, a well-baited hook for those who rue a world too fast a-changing. (Feb.)

Library Journal

The author (English, Bowdoin College) revisits the scene of youth, Horry County, South Carolina, and traces a canoe trip taken by Nathaniel Holmes Bishop in 1870. His account is not simply a recapitulation of a famous canoe trip, but a well-written tribute to an area and its people, economy, and history. Along the way, Burroughs meets some fascinating people: Thomas Spivey, a local woodcarver and boatbuilder; the Babsons, father and son, who run the local filling station; and an old friend, Rick McIver, a former smoke-jumper who accompanies him on the final third of the journey. Burroughs's book is a literary delight in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and Henry Van Dyke's Through Lupine and Laurel. --Donald H. Dederick, SUNY Health Science Ctr., Brooklyn