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  • The Water Is Wide: A Memoir by Pat Conroy book cover
  • The Water Is Wide: A Memoir by Pat Conroy book cover
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The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

by Pat Conroy

Teaching on Yamacraw Island

$18.95 USD
$31.59 USD $18.95 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Critical praise

    Praise from Charleston News and Courier

    Described as “a powerfully moving book.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

Teaching on Yamacraw Island

In this memoir, Pat Conroy recounts giving a year to teach on Yamacraw Island, a remote South Carolina community whose school lacks a teacher. The island’s families have long depended on the sea, but industrial waste now threatens that way of life, making education part of a wider struggle over the community’s future. The account brings together teaching, island life, and the pressures facing a small community separated from the mainland. Its focus on one teacher’s year offers a personal view of the links between education, place, and environmental change.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in memoirs about teaching and educators.
  • Readers curious about community life on a South Carolina island.
  • Readers interested in accounts connecting education and environmental pressures.

Themes

Teaching and educationIsland communitiesEnvironmental changeCommunity and livelihood

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

A "miraculous" (Newsweek) human drama, based on a true story, from the renowned author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini

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 way. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher--until one man gives a year of his life to the island and its people.

Praise for The Water Is Wide

"Miraculous . . . an experience of joy."--Newsweek

"A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail . . . and you will learn to love the man."--Charleston News and Courier

"A hell of a good story."--The New York Times

"Few novelists write as well, and none as beautifully."--Lexington Herald-Leader

"[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story."--Baltimore Sun
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