Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place

by Sudye Cauthen

The Florida I love is perishing, says Sudye Cauthen. In Southern Comforts, this fifth-generation Floridian blends memoir, oral history, and cultural geography to explore the tensions between community and environment in America today and her own ambivalence about Alachua, the place just north of Gainesville where she was born and reared. Cauthen raises a cry for all that is lost as Florida's--and America's--landscapes and traditions are replaced by interstates, condos, shopping malls, and the new way of life they represent.Part self-reflection, part meditation, and part social analysis, Cauthen's work threads through the stories of blacks, whites, and Native Americans--men and women--including her own family members. Through their words and hers, Cauthen explores northern Florida's unique history, culture, and geography while she seeks a greater understanding of herself and her surroundings.

Cauthen's journey takes readers down dirt roads and city streets, to her people's tobacco fields and churches. She sifts sand at an archaeological dig for the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, peers into an aboriginal grave, and everywhere marshals evidence for the primacy of place in determining who we are. One story takes us on a fox hunt; another reveals lingering racial problems. Permeating the book is the ever-present menace of growth and development and what it holds for Cauthen's Florida.

194 pages, Hardcover

First published January 25, 2007

Reviews

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanting to know more about "real" Florida, I saw this book on a reading list I'm working through and snatched it up. The book is focused around Alachua county in North Florida and I learned so much about the native vegetation and history of the area. Even though I had to work through the book, Googling here and there, it was a quick read and each time I picked it up the author's descriptiveness would whisk me away to Florida's natural countryside.

[Sandra Lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed on my weblog www.sandralambert.com

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

my cousin wrote this book