Sister Santee

by Ken Burger

Ken Burger has done it again! Our favorite newspaper columnist 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.

His second novel, Sister Santee, creates a perfect Palmetto State storm where changing times and racial realities torture every poor soul caught in the Sturm and Drang of the state’s self-imposed and natural disasters.

While focusing on the pine-scented swath known as Santee-Cooper Country, Ken takes us into the desperate dungeons of the State Mental Hospital on Bull Street, on a wild ride in a hijacked Air Force cargo plane, and inside the eye of a storm that changes the landscape and lives of everyone in its path.

Hardcover with dust jacket, Fiction

Available for Amazon’s Kindle here and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK here.

$26.95

SKU: 978-0-9825154-5-7 Categories: , Tags: ,

Ken Burger has done it again! Our favorite newspaper columnist 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.

His second novel, Sister Santee, creates a perfect Palmetto State storm where changing times and racial realities torture every poor soul caught in the Sturm and Drang of the state’s self-imposed and natural disasters.

While focusing on the pine-scented swath known as Santee-Cooper Country, Ken takes us into the desperate dungeons of the State Mental Hospital on Bull Street, on a wild ride in a hijacked Air Force cargo plane, and inside the eye of a storm that changes the landscape and lives of everyone in its path.

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.