Growing up in Charleston in the 1930s and 1940s, accomplished storyteller Louis Rubin witnessed firsthand the subtle gradations of caste and class among neighborhoods from south of Broad Street where established families and traditional mores held sway to the various enclaves of Uptown in which middle-class and blue-collar families went about their own diverse lives and routines. In Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston, Rubin draws on autobiography and imagination in briskly paced renderings of his native Charleston that capture the atmosphere of the Holy City during an era when the population...