Dream State
Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Descrição da editora
Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State is all Floridian, telling the grand and sometimes crazy story of the twenty-seventh state through the eyes of one of its native daughters.
Acclaimed journalist and NPR commentator Diane Roberts has many family secrets and she's ready to tell them. Like the time her cousin state Senator Luther Tucker wrapped his Caddy around a tree, allegedly with a jug of moonshine on the seat next to him. Or how cousin Susan Branford was given an African girl for her eighth birthday. Or the time when cousin Enid Broward was made the May Queen of 1907, even though her daddy the governor shocked the state by trying to drain the entire Everglades. Roberts' ancestors helped settle Florida, kill off its pesky Indians, enslave some of its inhabitants, clear its forests, lay its train tracks, and pave its roads, all the time weaving themselves into the very fabric of this dangling chad of a state.
With a storyteller's talent for setting great scenes, Roberts lays out the sweeping history of eight geberations of Browards and Bradfords, Tuckers anf Robertses, even as she Forest Gumps them into situations with more historically familiar names. Whether it's the American court of Catherine de Médicis, the Tallahassee court of Katherine Harris, Henry Flagler's boardroom -- not to mention his bedroom -- or Jeb Bush's statehouse, you're likely to find a branch or a root of the Roberts family growing entangled nearby.
Starting in the recent past with the botched presidential election of 2000, Roberts introduces the many sides of the debate, coincidentally peopled with cousins both kissing and close. She then goes back to Florida's first inhabitants, showing how this alluring peninsula many called a paradise played a role in the destiny of those who settled there. Following their colorful progress up to the present, she renders them all with a deep, familial affection.
Florida has forced itself into the collective American unconscious with its messed-up elections, anthrax scares, shark attacks,boat lifts, snowbirds, and the Bush dynasty. While exposing the real people whom Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard have been fictionalizing for years, Dream State ultimately reveals the cogs and wheels that make the state tick.
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With hurricane-force prose, journalist and Florida native Roberts hits the land of orange groves, theme parks and mobile homes with a torrential outpouring of love and hate, affection and disgust. Weaving her own family history into that of the state she's related somehow or other to many of Florida's pioneering families she chronicles the greed, political corruption and deceit that turned the swamps of the Sunshine State into a haven for retirees, wealthy or otherwise. She provides colorful sketches of the denizens of Florida, from the land-grabbing railroad tycoon Henry Flagler Jr., who turned South Florida into a playground for the rich and famous, to Gov. Claude Kirk, who tried to make the lowly mullet the state fish. Roberts reminds us that, despite Disney's glitter, Florida's backwoods and side roads reveal its true character as a Southern state still marked by racism and Confederate pride. In hilarious and touching sketches, Roberts nostalgically carries readers back to pre-Disney Florida while admitting that even then the state played by different rules than the rest of the country. If there was ever any doubt about the true nature of the Sunshine State where "what people think happened is always more important than what really happened" Roberts puts it to rest in this splendid unofficial history.