Salkehatchie Soup
by Ken Burger
In his usual no-holds-barred style, Burger’s tale of the Adger family continues from cushy golf resorts to a one-hole golf course in the middle of nowhere. Along the way, even small, seemingly private lives are caught up in the politics, crime, and intrigue of Washington, Manhattan, and Miami.
Hardcover, Fiction
$26.95
Ken Burger’s novel, Salkehatchie Soup, doesn’t disappoint. As in his previous tales (Swallow Savannah and Sister Santee), the cast of characters includes the powerful and the pitiful, both working through the options life presents them.
In his usual no-holds-barred style, Burger’s tale of the Adger family continues from cushy golf resorts to a one-hole golf course in the middle of nowhere. Along the way, even small, seemingly private lives are caught up in the politics, crime, and intrigue of Washington, Manhattan, and Miami.
In Burger’s mangy imagination, political bargains made in the cloakrooms of Congress impact both those who have fallen from grace and those who urgently seek it.
In his first novel, Swallow Savannah, Burger wrote about the collision of the Cold War and Civil Rights in the area around the Savannah River Site where plutonium for atomic weapons was produced in the 1950s and ’60s. In Sister Santee, he spun an all-too- believable yarn about the pine plantations and racial uneasiness in the 1970s and ’80s. With Salkehatchie Soup, Burger returned to his birthplace to expose the remains of 50 years of nuclear waste buried in our beautiful state.
About the Author
Ken Burger said 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 distinguished 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.
While writing for the Columbia papers and The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., Ken’s bread-and-butter topics included University of South Carolina and Clemson football, basketball and baseball as well as local high school and small-college teams.
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.
Ken’s love of writing landed him a ringside seat in athletic cathedrals that included Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Super Dome, and almost every other major temple of sport from coast to coast. When asked about his favorite sports moment, Ken smiles and says, “All of them.”
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.”
Ken also served a few years as the Washington D.C. news correspondent for The Post and Courier and wrote an award- winning metro news column for several years. But he spent more than a quarter-century covering Palmetto State sports.
His first novel, Swallow Savannah, was published in 2008. His second novel, Sister Santee, came out in 2010. Both novels were touted as among the best in Southern fiction by the Independent Publishers Association. Burger’s Baptized in Sweet Tea, won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Gift Book in 2011 by the Independent Book Publisher Association. This award-winning compilation of his best columns featured in The Post and Courier commemorates Southern identity and culture and resonates with readers of all ages. Burger previously published Life Through The Earholes Of Our Youth, a collection of sports columns that has become a collector’s item.
Ken Burger died in 2015. He was two days shy of his 66th birthday.
