Bluff County, S.C. 1950 
While Frank Finklea and his muckmates were sloughing trees out of the primal ooze, engineers in silver safety helmets stood off to the side drawing imaginary lines in the air. There was talk they were building the world s biggest bomb factory. That s why there was so much secrecy surrounding the project. The feds had bought up 300 square miles of rural South Carolina so it would have plenty of buffer if anything went wrong. 
And there was plenty that could go wrong. 
Finklea s survival instincts drew him out of the swampland to become one of the most powerful men in the state. As he ruthlessly built his empire, Finklea cared little for those he left in his wake: his trusting father-in-law, his beautiful, brutalized wife, his troubled mistress, and his gentle son. He gave no thought to the poor blacks he exploited or the neighbors he humiliated. Yet as time and the Savannah River flow through Bluff County, Finklea's sins were carried out of the swamps and into the open. In a single, violent day, decades of racial conflict and government corruption explode in South Carolina. 
Swallow Savannah is the story of a rural southern community caught between one man's all-consuming ambition and the dawning reality of civil rights.

Swallow Savannah

Literature & Fiction

Burger, Ken

Genre Fiction

Joggling Board Pr

Ken Burger uses words like a surgeon's scalpel to peel the skin off his native state, that asylum we all know as South Carolina, exposing its haunted history and some infamously flawed people who crawl out of his mangy imagination.

Sister Santee

United States

Evening Post Books

A collection of award-winning writer Ken Burger's best newspaper columns about life in the South, especially the Palmetto State. Features beautiful color photography of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Baptized in Sweet Tea: A Collection of Ken Burger's Columns Celebrating the South

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Salkehatchie Soup offers a fictional setting to the very real issue of nuclear waste stored underground in rural South Carolina. Ken Burger's origins in hard-hitting journalism left him with a desire to expose controversial issues affecting his home state. By presenting these issues in fiction, Burger grasped the opportunity to tie both historical and current events into a tightly woven tale of government espionage and the effects it can have on people from all walks of life.

Salkehatchie Soup

Ken Burger says he was an "accidental sports writer" because, coming out of college he had no intention of covering athletic events. He hardly knew which baseball teams were in the National League and which ones were in the American League. Doug Nye, sports editor of The Columbia (S.C.) Record, said that didn't matter. He liked Ken's style and hired him as a 20-something sports reporter in June 1973. That launched a long and distinquished career in which Ken earned so many S.C. Press Association writing awards that he lost count, a double handful of S.C. Sports Writer of the Year citations from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, three nods from the Associated Press as one of the best sports columnists in the country, the title of South Carolina's Journalist of the Year in 1996, and a special place in the journalism wing of the S.C. Athletic Hall of Fame. Privileged to be writing in what many considered the United States' heyday of sports journalism, Ken traveled far and wide to file dispatches from a dozen Super Bowls, several Final Fours, and almost every major golf tournament, including more than 20 Masters Tournaments. Well-armed with an impressive homeboy vocabulary, a keen sense of story, and an empathetic ear for human emotion, Ken consistently gave readers something timely that they could not get anywhere else, something he jokingly called "literature in a hurry." He spent more than a quarter-century covering Palmetto State sports - a gift, as you will read in this book, that keeps on giving. Like in his other five books, the final paragraph of his bio in this one says: "Born and raised in the town of Allendale, S.C., Burger graduated dead last in his class at the University of Georgia, has been married five times, is a gratefully recovering alcoholic, a cancer survivor and a happy man."

A Sporting Life

Sports & Outdoors

Miscellaneous