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Nonfiction reviews archived below:
The Season:
Inside Palm Beach and America's Richest Society by Ronald Kessler, reviewed by Susan Parsons
Mothering
Mother by Carol D. O'Dell, reviewed by Denise Sebesta Lanier |
The Season: Inside Palm Beach and America's Richest Society by Ronald
Kessler
(Harper Collins, Hardcover, 326 pp., Out of Print--used copies available on Amazon.com)
Reviewed by Susan Parsons
Every year at this time, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, approximately a million snowbirds descend on Florida.
Some year-round residents complain about the extra traffic on the roads; others, like restaurateurs and hoteliers,
look forward to the time of year when they can double their profits. Curious, I visited my local used bookstore and found
a book that examines a subset of the Florida snowbirds: the small crowd that flocks to Palm Beach. Ronald Kessler’s
1999 The Season: Inside Palm Beach and America’s Richest Society describes the very insulated world of some
of the richest Americans. Kessler, who had previously written an expose about the FBI, CIA and White House, decided to uncover what secrets
lurk behind those carefully manicured shrubs and to see what’s hidden in the back seats of those Bentleys and Rolls
Royces in Palm Beach. And uncover he does. I guess we’ve heard all about the William Kennedy Smith rape scandal, but
lesser known is the socialite who had her husband’s body stored in a funeral home for forty days so she wouldn’t
miss the season’s best parties. And then there was the restaurant owner who was murdered by a jewel thief when she startled
him—he didn’t hear her over the easy-listening music. And one might be surprised to find out which heiresses were
rumored to have participated in orgies. Then there’s the monetary decadence: $18 million estates, $180,000 Bentleys,
$10,000 dresses, Beluga caviar at $50 an ounce and jewels that are so expensive women have to take out insurance policies
just to wear them out for the evening. Kessler conducted his research by asking one Palm Beach resident to introduce him
to the next. Dragging along his wife, Pamela, by the end of the season he had negotiated his way on to the most exclusive
guest lists. One of the most fascinating aspects of Kessler’s book is the detailed description of the class system.
At the top of the pile sit the “old guard,” usually elderly women who have inherited great fortunes (in
the hundreds of millions or billions, dear) from “old” families such as the Posts, Kelloggs, Dodges,
duPonts and Pulitzers. Next are the children of such families—listless, unemployed trust fund babies simply waiting
for dear old Mom to kick off so they can collect their fortune. Below them aspire “the Pretenders,” or the nouveau
riche who try way too hard. Then come the imported royalty and ambassadors who are shipped in for balls.
Various hustlers fill the next tier: walkers—gay men who escort the elderly ladies to balls,
fifth wives, those young things who marry very elderly gentlemen in order to eventually duke it out for their fortune with
their heirs, and of course your garden variety prostitute, who is willing to duck under a tasteful tablecloth. The town police,
club owners and restaurateurs come next, with the maids, gardeners, and exterminators at the bottom. Kessler
interviews people from most of these categories. He is a wealth of information, in fact. When
speaking of one socialite or another, he manages to cram in details of their exact worth and family history. He
writes: Among
the megaresidents who have homes of Babylonian splendor on Palm Avenue are John Kluge (worth $10.5 billion from Metromedia);
Ronald O. Perleman ($4.2 billion from Revlon and other investments); Si Newhouse, Jr. ($4.5 billion from publishing); Estee
Lauder’s sons, Ronald ($4.4 billion from cosmetics) and Leonard ($4.4 billion from the same company); David Koch ($3
billion from oil)...
The list goes on and on. Kessler, himself Jewish,
seems a bit astonished to discover that anti-Semitism is common among the old guard. Jews at the time of
his research were not allowed at the two exclusive country clubs in Palm Beach—the Everglades and the Bath & Tennis.
Says Chesbrough Pacevitch, heiress to the Conde Nast fortune, “The Jews don’t behave themselves. . . that’s
why they don’t get in. . . they are rude and pushy.” Donald Trump, an example of the Pretenders,
or nouveau riches, opened up a club, the Mar a Lago, which does allow Jews. In the chapter entitled “The
Trumpster” one learns a lot about Trump, including his eating habits (munching on bacon and peanuts), how much gas he
spends to fly down in his private jet from NYC on weekends ($40,000) and how he bought the Mar a Lago estate from the town
for $8 million (including the furnishings) and how he brags that the estate is worth much, much more than the town realized.
If you’re looking for gossip about the Kennedys, there is no chapter on the William Kennedy Smith scandal, but
there are few little tidbits. The local sheriff likes to joke that after the Kennedys sold their estate
and left town, the crime rate dropped thirty percent. A socialite once remarked that Joseph P. Kennedy
was “one of the greatest crooks she ever met.” Kessler includes a passage about Rose Kennedy calling a local hotel
and arguing with the clerk because she wanted the same rate she had paid the previous year.
Charity balls, two or three every night during the season, are the main attraction for the Palm Beach snowbirds.
Society ladies vie to host the more prestigious balls, and Pretenders throw elaborate balls in hopes of working their
way into the “in” crowd. However, the balls don’t necessarily raise that much money for
charity. Most of the ticket price covers the bill for putting on the ball. The foundation for one ball,
for example, collects $68,000 a year but only donates $5,000 to the charity it sponsors. But no matter, Kessler explains,
the Palm Beach crowd isn’t in it to raise funds, they are in it to be seen.
Kessler’s research reveals many secrets: sex scandals, royal titles that were purchased, people who misrepresent
their fortunes, cheap trust fund babies trying to stretch out their millions so they’ll never have to work and loads
and loads of plastic surgery. The Season is a good primer if you’re a gold-digger looking
for the ins and outs of Palm Beach, or if you just want to get a little peek at how this particular nest of snowbirds lives
while you’re enjoying the Florida sun on a less expensive stretch of beach.
Susan Parsons is Publisher
of The Florida Book Review.
Mothering
Mother by Carol D. O’Dell (Kunati, Inc., Hardcover, 208 pp., $19.95) Reviewed
by Denise Sebesta Lanier
I should
say upfront that I feel a kind of sisterhood with this author. Both of us have experienced the privilege (and the burden)
of caregiving for an elderly mother—attempting to juggle family and academic obligations, trying not to lose self or
sanity. O’Dell, a Southerner,
was adopted as an only child to older parents. Her father died of a heart attack when she was in her twenties. Some fifteen
years later, when the combination of advancing age and Parkinson’s made it untenable for her mother, Novaline DeVault,
to live alone, O’Dell’s husband built an apartment onto their home and Novaline moved in. Novaline
(who’d been a fundamentalist minister and still maintained her passionate faith) had elicited a promise from O’Dell
when she was just a child, making her swear that she would never put her mother into a nursing home. This book is the story
of the fulfillment of that promise, both the blessings and the tolls. What begins as some assistance here
and there with dressing, bathing, balance for walking, and preparing meals turns into a full-time job entailing everything
from spoon-feeding to diaper changes. The
vignettes that describe the daily to-dos of assisting someone with a failing mind and body are filled with evocative details
and routines which are all-too-familiar to me, as they will be to anyone in the position of caregiving for a loved one. O’Dell
possesses the gifts of humor and irony and wields them well, always managing to offset with some deft line the day-to-day
insults and the emotional tragedies, large and small, that so often go unnoticed while witnessing, partnering, the decline
of a physical body that becomes as familiar to you as your own. That word—familiar: its root is family. O’Dell
takes us along on her journey, attempting to balance the needs and desires of her family, which includes three daughters.
It is so easy to forget, even for the caregivers themselves, that in order to care for others we must keep ourselves somewhat
safe and healthy and sane in the process. O’Dell, better than anyone else I’ve read, speaks honestly, humbly,
painfully about this ominous, unremitting challenge inherent in the caregiving life: Sometimes I imagine
I’m a giant milkshake and my family is all sitting around me at some fifties diner. Each of them has a straw and sucks
on it, red in the face. They grab the glass and tilt it their way, hitting the side with their palm, snatching it from each
other to make sure nothing’s left. Mother can be the worst. Speaking of the bind those caring
for both children and parents face, O’Dell says: “The term ‘sandwich generation’ is ridiculously inadequate
to describe those of us caught between raising our own children and caring for an elderly parent. I’ve got a better
one: the ‘vise-grip generation.’” And she articulates the differences between the roles:
“Even within the confines of raising children, there’s a certain amount of freedom and the satisfaction that you’re
the one who’s somewhat in charge, at least for the first ten years. I’m finding that when your parent lives with
you, those lines are blurred, if not obliterated.” Taken as a memoir, this book is a must-read
for anybody of the vise-grip generation. However, what concerns me is that the book flap advertises this book also as a “How-to.”
I believe that is a categorization that should be weighed thoughtfully. Several times, reading O’Dell’s narrative,
I found myself awash in concern for dangerous situations that occurred. The author speaks of leaving to run errands with her
mother alone in the home far past the time when Novaline could be assumed safe without supervision. Likewise, Novaline was
left alone in her own apartment (attached to O’Dell’s home) nightly, when it seemed obvious—to this reader,
at least—that 24-hour supervision was required. One incident had O’Dell waking in the middle of the night to loud
noises, finding her mother standing in the middle of a floor strewn with broken glass.
The author speaks openly about her determination to take care of her mother alone: “I just don’t want anyone
getting between my mother and me.” But determination and devotion are not enough. When O’Dell walks in to find
her mother (and the floor) covered in feces, she does not want anyone to see her mother like that, so instead of calling for
help, she—along with her mother—fall while trying to get her mother into the bathroom to get cleaned up.
I’m not judging Carol O’Dell. She’s a phenomenally brave woman who did her best
to care for her mother. The fact is that the job is, more often than not, too big and complex for one person
to manage. Which is why it’s so crucial to ask for help, to allow yourself to receive help.
O’Dell describes arriving at a “breaking point” the day that her daughter, Cherish, has to be taken
to the hospital because of a kidney infection. “My child needed me and I didn’t even pick up on it.” Surgery
was barely avoided. O’Dell says, “I sat there, stunned, not ever having fully realized the
impact of Mother’s care on my children’s lives.” O’Dell says, “I
admitted to myself, perhaps for the first time, that this was too much . . . no one would or should subject a child to this.”
She realizes she is not even taking care of herself properly. But when she seeks help, her insurance company refuses the money
that would be needed either for nursing care or assisted living, her husband insists that they can handle it, and memories
of her mother’s dignified self and current moments of tenderness push her back towards her original vow. Then her mother’s
condition worsens so that O’Dell realizes death will come soon—and, ironically, help in the form of hospice care
is then available. O’Dell asks, “...why offer help only at the end? If she
had had cancer or some other painful disease, I could have had help months ago...I guess their six-month time period is less
predictable with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.” O’Dell writes that “There’s
so little out there on how to do this,” and I hope that we will see more. While it’s not an instruction manual
for caregiving, Mothering Mother is an honest, well-written contribution to the literature of parent-care, serving,
as memoir often does, as a cautionary tale of how the best intentions are not always enough.
Denise
Sebesta Lanier ‘s essays have appeared in the Miami Herald and Story Circle Journal. Her poetry has
appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Independent News, Luna, and Bloomsbury Review. As a native Texan, Denise
feels right at home with the Florida hurricane season—though she much prefers armadillos to alligators. She is an MFA
candidate in Florida International University’s creative writing program and lives in Hollywood Beach.
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Florida history reviews archived below:
Losing
It All to Sprawl by Bill Belleville, reviewed by Lynne Barrett Weeki Wachee, City of
Mermaids by Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne, reviewed by Lynne Barrett
Miami Beach
Memories by Joann Biondi, reviewed by Marjorie Klein
The Swamp by Michael Grunwald, reviewed by
Brian Sullivan |
Losing It All to Sprawl: How
Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape by Bill Belleville
(University Press of Florida, Hardcover
199 pp., $24.95)
Reviewed by Lynne Barrett
Next to the travel writing there needs to
be a shelf for the literature of staying put. On it would be Thoreau's Walden, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings'
Cross Creek, and William Least Heat Moon's Prairy Erth, books whose writers confined their skills of
observation to one place while letting the mind range far. It can be a greater challenge, in this form, to construct narrative;
the writer needs to tease out the larger implications in small incidents, to sing the turns of the natural year, and to trace
the deeper story of land and time. Bill Belleville does all of this, but his Losing It All
to Sprawl has more story than most, as he sets the value of one place against the accelerating tragedy of what those
who favor it call "development."
Belleville is
most known as the exploring author of River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River and Sunken Cities,
Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks. But in this book he documents his decade in a house down unpaved Sewell
Road off S.R. 46 in Sanford, in an area once known for celery farming. When he gets there the neighborhood has lapsed from
its agricultural heyday and a ruined orchard has long been going back to woodland. Divorced and somewhat rootless, he gradually
falls in love as he learns the materials and meaning of his Cracker house, built pragmatically for the climate before air
conditioning:
"The house was constructed
from dense, heavy, heart cypress, which provided its own measure of natural insulation, and it was up on concrete blocks to
allow air to circulate under it. Its elevation also kept it above the low ground, preparing it for that special Florida moment
when monsoonal summer rains overwhelm the earth's ability to absorb them. Its roof was metal so that it would reflect
the sun, and its generously wide gables and overhangs would shelter most of the windows from the overhead glow. Two giant
deciduous hardwoods also stood guard, proving more shade--a southern magnolia to the front and a water oak to the side between
the house and the garage. The structure was more rectangular than not, and most of its girth was arranged on a north-south
axis for good reason: Its exterior walls could absorb solar heat from a low winter sun while also avoiding the scorch when
the summer sun was high overhead."
"For
good reason" is the thought that beats through this book. The logic and grace that the builders and owners of this house
and their neighbors brought to their lives, whose hard work and small pleasures Belleville comes to know, are set against
the many bad reasons of those taking their place—the fatuous belief in progress, the politicians who give away more
to developers than the development will bring in, the desperate agreement of those who want work, and behind them the long
sequence of mistakes that is the history of Florida's relationship to the land.
Even as Belleville is, like the area's gopher tortoises, finding his burrow, out on the nearby highway a new predator
is entering the territory, its cry the beeping of the back-up signals on huge bulldozers. A mall is to be built. And as it
arrives, everything changes. S.R. 46 doubles in width. Auto dealerships arrive and send up searchlights. "The sky has
been diluted by light, and constellations that must have been comforting for ages have disappeared," Belleville writes.
The gopher tortoises, displaced, seek new habitat. Homes are sold to a speculator who rents them to drifters, thus lowering
the value of the nearby homes which he is avid to buy. Belleville cast the same naturalist's eyes with which he studies
an owl or a rabbit on those who move in; he sees the temporary workers who come for quick money and drug themselves on the
proceeds, the neglected children, the rage of a thwarted moneymaker and the timidity of a homeless woman who camps nearby,
the idealism of those who fight and the pragmatic resignation of those who leave. For relief from the dismay of sad discoveries,
he takes us on escapes into protected (but still threatened) areas, where he takes joy in discovering a natural spring and
understanding the land as the Timacua and Mayaca and Seminoles saw it, as the contrast between the untouched and the despoiled
widens.
Just as he reads the landscape, Belleville reads
the history of Florida. He often draws on Rawling's Cross Creek, his nearest literary neighbor, but he forages
through all sorts of materials. The book includes a bibliography that ranges from the first observers of Florida, like William
Bartram in the 18th century, to the geological bulletins and hydrology studies which document what's happening today.
At one point Belleville gets his hands on a rare copy of the out of print (since 1929) From Eden to Sahara by John
Kunkel Small, which predicts what will happen as Florida dries up and comes to match the earth's other places at this
latitude.
At the same time, Belleville gathers the unwritten
history of his particular place from those who have lived there. Not all is nostalgia--while we get the pleasures of flowering
shrubs and bathing in the coquina pond, we also learn about the exploitation of workers and the bad choices which almost always
have to do with water, the once-abundant resource that led to overwatering which leached the nutrients from the soil, the
flooded celery fields vulnerable to fungus controlled by copper sulfate till it built up copper in the soil , the cutting
of slash pine woods to make way for crops which couldn't thrive on the poorly drained soil, till the land became more
desirable for development than any other use.
As the doom of Belleville's
paradise got ever closer, I found myself silently urging him to DO something, the way one yells at the hero in a horror movie.
But of course that yearning for someone else to be the hero is what lets all of us stay passive. Belleville shows us those
who fight and the immense forces arrayed against them, but with sad grace he does merely the best he can for his bit of land,
and the most he can, in writing this book, to stir us all.
Lynne Barrett is the author of The Secret Names of Women and editor of The Florida Book
Review.
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Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida’s Oldest Roadside Attractions
by Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne (University Press of Florida, Hardcover, 294 pp.,$34.95) Reviewed by Lynne Barrett
Take a deep breath.
Hold it. Plunge into the waters of Weeki Wachee Springs and in their strange clarity see the ghosts of mastodons
and movie stars, conquistadors and stuntmen, and, above all, girls, Florida girls transmogrified into that strange creature—athlete
and ballerina, ethereal and practical, woman and fish—the mermaid. Gasping? Okay, you can breathe again. Though Newt
Perry, Florida’s Human Fish, could hold his breath for 5 minutes, his barrel chest so strong, his vitality so great
they thought he was immortal. In the Twenties and Thirties, Perry led the way to making Florida’s
ancient springs a place of fun on film. For Grantland Rice newsreels he went from chasing turtles with
Johnny Weissmuller to staging ever more elaborate scenes remarkable simply for happening underwater, in water clear enough
to film through. The tricks of eating bananas and drinking soda underwater led to the underwater track meet, underwater magic
carpet ride, underwater “Silver Fizz Night Club” with bar and four piece band (Newt Perry, bartending). And he
instigated the technological innovations to stage and film them. This period was full of the spirit of
“let’s put on a show,” invention and improvisation, using the wildlife, the water, the local people who
learned how to entertain by simple illusion. How do you smoke underwater? “To imitate a smoker, a
boy would take a slug of milk and pretend to puff on a piece of chalk.” How do you appear to pour coffee underwater?
Read the book. In Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids, novelist Lu Vickers and documentary filmmaker Sara Dionne
have put together a wonderful work of cultural and natural history, a tale of myth and kitsch, the ur-Florida story of a rise
which causes its own fall, and perhaps a rise again. Having worked at Silver Springs on a series of Tarzan movies, Perry was recruited
to Wakulla Springs, where he had the swim team from Florida State College for Women and his own Wakulla Aquamaids doing synchronized
swim. He figured out how to use airlocks –breathing stations—and air hoses to do underwater shows.
He held a Miss Underwater of Florida contest (a pageant ten feet below the surface) in 1947 and then moved on to be
aquatic director at Weeki Wachee, on US 19 north of Tarpon Springs, where he debuted his Aqua Belles. Soon Ann Blyth was there
filming “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.” The movie let Perry recruit new swimmers, to be proclaimed for the first
time as mermaids. A notice in the St. Petersburg Independent said, “Main requirements Perry states are beauty and long
hair that will flow with the current...It won’t be necessary for the girls even to know how to swim, as long as they
can hold their breath underwater.” But those who came and learned from the Human Fish needed, it
soon becomes apparent, to be gutsy, as they learned to breathe pressurized air from hoses and dive deep and surface properly,
to study ballet and avoid hypothermia, and perform ever greater feats of what might be called survival with allure.
And allure they did. The book documents the rise of Weeki Wachee the tourist attraction, as the underwater theater
is constructed and shows expand, bringing gift shop, motel, restaurant, and a parade of celebrities from Esther Williams to
Elvis. ABC bought Weeki Wachee in 1959 and built a million dollar theater with sound system and clamshell
roof, paid for choreography and costumes, and the performances became full productions. Arthur Godfrey
came to do a live television special “Gurgle Along with Godfrey.” Weeki Wachee became its own
tiny town in 1966 because ABC wanted it to show up on the map, just one bit of the relentless publicity trying to draw tourists
to West Florida. And then the map changed. Disney began construction in spring 1969 at
a crossroads of major highways in Central Florida. Attempting to compete, Weeki Wachee put in an exotic bird show and naturalist
exhibits. But Disney inexorably drew tourists away. Development near Weeki Wachee started in the late 60’s too, and
fertilizer entered the aquifer that feeds the spring, bringing algae. Cloudy water in 1976 made it impossible to do the full
show for 9 months, so the mermaids performed close to the glass (“London Fog Mystery With Sherlock Holmes”) and
an amphitheater was put in for a high dive show. In 1979 a water park was added. In 1983 at a mermaid reunion, Newt Perry,
the old king, paralyzed by a stroke, came and sat in a wheelchair surrounded by his mermaids and mermen. The following year,
ABC sold the park to a management group which sold it to another in 1989, and their various attempts to save money took Weeki
Wachee further from its history, as property deteriorated, props were destroyed, historic photographs cast aside (some rescued
by mermaids) and long-term employees fired with accompanying loss of know-how. Weeki Wachee became best
known as kitsch, a remnant of the goofy past. But ruin has a depth and meaning of its own. Writers
and filmmakers keep going back to Weeki Wachee to elucidate its significance and use its beauty. In 1997,
instigated by the inquiries of an NPR reporter, some of the earliest mermaids got together and from their stories a 50th
anniversary show was born, with the first production by former mermaids. And the old magic—and crowds—came
with them: The mermaids paid tribute to shows of the past; they walked a tight-rope, played underwater golf, performed balletic
moves taught to the original mermaids by Newt Perry: the foot-first dolphin, the flowing knee-back dolphin, the Ferris wheel.
They did the “human elevator”: arced their bodies, pointed their arms out like movie stars, then drifted
slow upward through the blue water, still as statues. Then they blew out streams of perfect silver bubbles
and descended. They guzzled soda and ate bananas, then tossed the yellow peels to the turtles.
One mermaid lifted Bonnie arched high above her head, and both ascended, performing Weeki Wachee’s trademark
adagio, the pose that is immortalized in the statue in front of the park. The reader knows what the adagio looks
like, because the book is loaded with pictures, staff photos, postcards, billboards, wonderful publicity shots and cheesy
brochures. I own one of the pamphlets myself, with Bob Hope saying, “The live Mermaids are the greatest
at Weeki Wachee.” But what’s different here is that the mermaids (and mermen, who modestly admit they come second)
are identified, named where before they were nameless, and so the continuity of their story becomes visible. Mary
Darlington Fletcher on page 4 is an adorable teenage girl feeding the fish underwater in 1948. Mary Darlington
Fletcher on page 238, 67 years old in a white gown with sparkling white mermaid tail, is a dignified mermaid queen, inspiring
a new dream. The nameless become the ones truly celebrated in this book for their grace, discipline, art,
and an endurance far beyond holding ones breath, because they have come back to save the place. Weeki Wachee is not saved
yet. At this point the Southwest Florida Water Management District owns the spring and surrounding acreage, and the park is
leased back to the tiny city of Weeki Wachee, its few residents veterans who care about the place. Whether
fundraising needed to make necessary repairs will succeed is a question. The authors leave us with the
60’s theater being restored and mermaid reunion shows a draw, the old skills revived and passed along. But
the mermaids have redeemed it in another sense: they saved the photos, the stories, the memories, that go into this book.
Lu Vickers, Sara Dionne, and The University of Florida Press’s Florida History and Culture Series bring us
a book that’s beautiful to flip through, engrossing to read, entertaining, serious history about a place that hasn’t
always been serious about itself.
Lynne Barrett is author of The Secret Names of Women and editor of The Florida Book Review.
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America’s REAL First Thanksgiving, by Robyn Gioia
(Pineapple Press, Hardcover, 48 pp., $14.95,
Ages 9-12)
Reviewed by Yaddyra Peralta
This year on Thanksgiving,
many families will not be sitting down to the usual turkey, stuffing, yams and pumpkin pie. Many will partake of meals
that supplement or completely replace the American tradition with dishes such as roast pork, rice and beans, lasagna, kimchee
and chutney. In some ways, it is the children of these families, with tentative ties to an adopted homeland, who are
the ideal readers of a book that attempts to present a revised history of the holiday.
In America’s REAL First Thanksgiving, Robyn Gioia dates the first Thanksgiving feast to one held in St.
Augustine, Florida on September 8, 1565, fifty-six years before the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.
The author divides her book into eight chapters, with only the last two describing the banquet that was the culmination of
Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’ voyage to claim North America for Spain. The earlier chapters
provide a context for Menéndez’s landing, describing not only the golden age of exploration but also a Spain
hungry for more goods and new markets. Gioia also places us in the world of the Timucua, the Florida natives who the
Spaniards encountered in St. Augustine.
At times, America’s
REAL First Thanksgiving reminded me of an encyclopedia or a textbook. It’s full of great archival reproductions
of beautiful, and revealingly inaccurate maps of the time, as well as colorful paintings by the French artist Jacques le Moyne
that show the Timucua farming and hunting for alligator in all their tattooed glory. Though this book can be seen as
an asset to classrooms teaching Florida history, I have a few reservations. The quality of the illustrations is so inconsistent
that the inferior ones, which look like coloring book pages, stand out. And all are so thoroughly captioned they often
compete with, rather than elucidate, the main text.
This revised history, while interesting, treats
the problem of Thanksgiving somewhat superficially. The St. Augustine feast changes the date and location, and there
is speculation that the food might have been a bit different, but I can’t help thinking that, at heart, it’s the
same old story. A feast between two peoples, essentially natives and conquerors, is presented as an amicable encounter,
when evidence shows that, at least for the Timucua, it was a prelude to great change. I know, it’s not the topic
of the book, but even a hint of the tension beneath the surface would have made this promising book much better. Kids
today, whether children of immigrants or from families here so long they feel securely American, can learn from a more
frank and nuanced discussion of the past. What better place than Florida to get this conversation going? Yaddyra Peralta is an MFA candidate at Florida
International University. She also teaches reading and writing at Riverside Elementary in Little Havana.
Miami Beach Memories by Joann Biondi
(Globe Pequot, Hardcover, 192 pp., $24.95)
Reviewed by Marjorie Klein
You can
live in a city and think you know the place inside and out until you read a book like Joann Biondi’s Miami Beach
Memories and realize you didn’t know it at all. Sure, you know the facts, you’ve heard
the stories, you’ve seen (as I have) its evolution for over 40 years from Sun and Fun Capital of the World to Crime
Capital of the World to today’s Celebrity-of-the-Month-Sighting Capital of the World. But Biondi’s
book uncovers the truth beneath the glitter and glam with stories told by real people in their own voices. Real people
like Iona Holmes, who worked as a maid in the Mayfair Hotel in the 1930s, where a sign was posted in the lobby: No dogs,
no Jews, no coloreds. Holmes recalls: “We couldn’t even use the toilets in the hotel
where we worked. If we had to go to the bathroom during our eight-hour shift, we had to walk three blocks
away to another hotel that had a special servants’ bathroom for blacks—even when it was raining.” Or attorney
Burton Young, whose story is the flip side of segregation: “My civics teacher,
Harold Matheson, took our class on a field trip to Overtown to see the little shacks where poor black people lived.
Matheson was a social activist who wanted us Miami Beach kids to see how privileged we were. He
told the class, ‘This is where your maids live. The women who take care of your little brothers and
sisters. The women who iron your clothes.’ It was shocking to us—absolute
squalor and yet so close to Miami Beach.” This book of memories isn’t mere nostalgia for a time gone by.
It should be required reading for clueless newcomers who see Miami Beach as a playground created just for them.
Even hedonism has a history, and today’s pleasure palaces have nothing on what preceded them: anomalies in a
puritan world, quaint, perhaps, by today’s standards, but daring for their time. Here’s Tempest Storm,
former stripper, one of the biggest names in the not-so-underground world of burlesque, gamblers, mobsters and celebrities
that gave Miami Beach its naughty reputation: “I worked at Place Pigalle in the late 1950s. During
that era strippers still had class”. But even more revealing of the time is this: “I
dated a lot of wonderful men, including Sammy Davis. Being a country girl from Georgia, going out with
Sammy was a very provocative thing at the time. I realize now I could have been tarred and feathered for
it. But I didn’t care”. Biondi’s interviews elicit memories from people whose
experiences range from the shame of being booted out of country clubs for being Jewish, to the pride of being a pioneer at
the birth of the hotel industry, to the no-big-deal aspect of meeting movie stars and even the President in your home.
Names we’ve heard over the years come to life once more, from the notorious (Al Capone; former jewel-thief Murf
the Surf; J. Edgar Hoover) to the stentorian (TV star/deadbeat Larry King). Each interview is riveting
with authentic voices telling stories that paint a clearer picture of Miami Beach’s checkered past than any history
book could do. Informative and tremendous fun to read, Miami Beach Memories’ fascinating
photos and tell-tale tales give this crazy town a fresh new perspective.
Marjorie Klein's
first novel, Test Pattern (Morrow), will with luck be followed by the second, if she ever finishes it. She
teaches creative writing at the University of Miami and is the recipient of a 2007 Florida Individual Artist fellowship.
The Swamp by Michael Grunwald (Simon
& Schuster, Paperback, 480 pp., $15.00) Reviewed by Brian Sullivan
I attended
an Audubon-sponsored lecture once about the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) and was treated to a stupefying
alphabet soup of agencies, commissions and projects. I had to check for a pulse when it was over. And when
I took the Everglades National Park Shark Valley tram tour, the park ranger gave a talk, the gist of which was that every
time we took a drink of water we were killing the Everglades. He was pretty clear that the only decent
thing for us to do was to go home and put an end to our pointless and ecologically-damaging lives. When
I opened this book, I was bracing for the same kind of experience. I was wrong. The
Swamp is great.
Michael Grunwald, a reporter at The Washington Post, has written a truly
entertaining history of the Everglades: what it is, where we are, and how we got there. Many of Grunwald’s
characters are rogues, some are noble, but almost all of them, one way or another, get stuck in the swamp. In 1564, the conquistador
Menendez is forced to commit bigamy with a Calusa chief’s sister, with Menendez’s brother-in-law looking on, in
order to save the Spaniard’s skins. In a different era, Bill Clinton interrupts his breakup with
Monica Lewinsky to take a call from one of the Big Sugar barons. Grunwald knows exactly how to write a
history without bogging down, getting too dry or losing the point. There isn’t a boring page in the
book. In the introduction Grunwald says, “It’s a story about hubris and unintended
consequences, about the mistakes man has made in his relationship with nature and his unprecedented efforts to fix them.”
He then chronicles the shifting intellectual fashions that controlled thinking about the Everglades. From
the time of the conquistadors till the Seminole Wars, the huge expanse of water and sawgrass was seen as worthless, “…
suitable only as the haunt of noxious vermin.” Then, in the years before the Civil War, it was going
to be an agricultural empire, ending the nation’s dependence on the West Indies for sugar and citrus products.
Before World War I, Governor Broward planned to drain the Everglades and provide cheap, fertile land to the poverty-stricken
farmers of Northern Florida. However, in 1928, when that long-held came true in the Okeechobee area, a hurricane
drowned thousands of farmers. Herbert Hoover built a great dike around the lake and diverted the flow to
the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to save lives. The Corps of Engineers finished the canals that
drained the upper glades, straightened the Kissimmee River so Orlando’s effluvium could drain directly into Lake Okeechobee,
and built dikes and canals so South Florida’s suburbs could expand into the Everglades.
As
all this was accomplished, one of the world’s great ecological disasters began to unfold. The Everglades
dried up and began to die and the wildlife rich estuaries became polluted nightmares. Lake Okeechobee turned
brown and grew huge floating mats of vegetable crud. Wells near Miami started pumping up saltwater. For
hundreds of years, the question was ‘What do we do about the water?’ After many false starts
and disasters, we finally had the means and technology to drain the Everglades and when we did it … whoops…
what do we do about the water? At that point, with the environmental movement, the intellectual
fashion changed again and now we are trying to turn it all around. Grunwald describes how this happened,
the dreams, the science, and the politics. Finally, he describes the response, the $10 billion CERP. As
Grunwald details, the CERP will not restore the Everglades, just slow down its death, but does guarantee that enough water
is available for South Florida to continue its booming growth. The inside story of the politics surrounding
the CERP is especially well done. In this section, for instance, Grunwald makes a convincing case that
Al Gore’s failure to oppose the Homestead airport in 2000 cost him the election. The great
thing about this book is its tone. This is not a screed; it is not an environmental guilt-trip.
It’s alarming without being alarmist. Grunwald even-handedly covers how so many people, often
with good intentions, managed to destroy the Everglades. The Swamp has something for everyone:
environmentalists, Florida historians and political junkies.
Brian Sullivan is a systems consultant working
in South Florida.
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