"Sudye Cauthen's meditation on a small town in North Florida, Southern Comforts, is a marvelous blend of memoir, history, and wisdom. A dot on the map, Alachua is Cauthen's knife in the heart, cutting to the quick of who she is and what she knows. Understanding Alachua--its history and her family's--is at the center of this book. Cauthen calls herself Alachua's heretic daughter, but she's actually its savior: no matter how Alachua develops, readers of Cauthen's book will know how it once was. And they'll know much more, having witnessed a sensitive soul pondering what makes her who she is, her quest for understanding guiding us all along in our own efforts to know who we are."
----Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr. Author of The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor
"Cauthen's book is a personal history told so beautifully, layer upon layer, that even James Agee would be undone. A longing like a wildfire runs through these pages, entwined in stories of farmers and preachers, churchgoers and criminals: Go back, go back. Folkloric and spiritual, this uncommon study is a monument to a place that was."
----Janisse Ray, Author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
"To make history—place—beat with the pulse of blood is perhaps the most difficult of all the writer's alchemy and, when it is done well, it is the most rewarding. Cauthen has rewarded us with the eye, ear, and memory of the natural writer. Pick up Southern Comforts and read it all in one sitting, as I did."
----Harry Crews, Author of A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
"This wonderful memoir is better than a novel…Sudye Cauthen does for Florida what no one has done before, what Faulkner and Welty did for Mississippi."
----Louise Westling, author of SACRED GROVES AND RAVAGED GARDENS: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor
"Oral history has seldom been used so effectively to evoke a past, a present and a future of a very special spot on the Earth. I delighted in Cauthen's observations, both personal and universal, that bring a north Florida environment and culture to life."
----Peggy A. Bulger, Director, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
"In Southern Comforts: Rooted in A Florida Place, Sudye Cauthen wrestles with why her home in Alachua, Florida, so possesses and defines her life. On page after page, Cauthen and Alachua both embrace and struggle with each other. Just as kudzu wraps its leafy tentacles around a deserted car or tree, Cauthen reaches out with equal determination to the living and the dead. In riveting conversations with family and friends, Cauthen takes us on a journey that forever changes her life and our own."
----William Ferris, Co-editor, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
"Sudye Cauthen has composed a beautiful reflection on her small postage stamp of soil in North Central Florida. Blending genres artistically, she has produced a picture of Alachua, the town and parts of the county, that weaves together folklore, autobiography, history, and anthropology. She knows that not-so-long ago rural territory deeply and lovingly, familiar with many of its people of the past and the present, both black and white, every back road, and most of its landmarks.
"This is Florida that few tourists or residents have any notion of. And it is fast disappearing, a condition that she profoundly regrets. So Cauthen has done us all a favor by acquainting us with a community and way of life richly worth knowing about. Kudos and thanks to her."
----Samuel S. Hill, Jr. Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited
"In Eight Habits of the Heart, Clifton Taulbert asserts that each person is a book to be discovered, read, and appreciated as we build communities to enrich our lives and in Sudye Cauthen's Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place, we are greeted by plain country folks like Aunt Tomye with her broad smile, diamond earrings, and Bible marked at the "Twenty-Third Psalm. A book herself, she is one of dozens of carefully drawn characters brought to life in Alachua County in north central Florida, a place dubbed "the Eden of the South." Local color abounds in Cauthen's personal journey home. Here, 100 pounds of cotton were picked for one dollar in 1910; here, the boll weevil suddenly appeared and devastated the land. By the end of Cauthen's journey into her past, it is time to pack a bag and explore Alachua County for ourselves"
----Colby Kullman, Professor of English, University of Mississippi
A tour de force. Intricately weaving her personal evolution as an observer and recorder of life with the voices of people and places from the past, Cauthen takes her readers on an illuminating journey into central Florida . . . has managed to capture the subtle, almost silent, rhythms of the isolated countryside while holding the strident cacophony of a busy, growing and intrusive modern world at bay.
----Nick Wynne, Executive Director, Florida Historical Society