"South of Orlando, Florida was opened up in the nearly exclusive
control of big dreamers. . . Frequently [they] were of as uncertain
substance as the real estate they held." This is, in the main, a
familiar view of the Sunshine State, its underwater lots,
promotional gimmickry, and ever-ready immigrants; its poachers,
moonshiners, rum-runners, and drug-smugglers. Plus: "the symbiosis
between Florida crime and Florida real estate" - and the alliance
of government with both. (See, of late, David Nolan's Fifty Feet in
Paradise.) What Rothchild supplies is a personal element that can
be hackneyed in its own post-Sixties confessional fashion - how he
came to cover the 1972 Republican convention, instead holed up and
spaced out in a Miami mansion with poolside radicals and luscious
Susan (the teenage nymph who turned out to be a divorced mother of
two, with a trust fund). But Rothchild also has on tap childhood
recollections of "homesteading" in St. Petersburg - where the
waterfront "was a dynamic reproductive culture in which a small bit
of substance could produce more." And he and Susan subsequently
settled in at scruffy, swampy, mosquito-infested Everglades City,
seeing it give ground in seven years to condo development,
environmentalists (like Rothchild and Marjory Stonemen Douglas)
notwithstanding. "It is, I think, the national perception of
Florida as the answer to discomfort that makes it popular only on
comfortable terms." The pair returned to Miami "in the knowledge. .
. that a spectator who lingers is part of the spectacle" - and
there Rothchild concentrates on a murky tangle of CIA/Mafia,
terrorist/drug machinations (in which he got ignominiously
involved). Readers will respond according to their prior exposure
to the various tacky or seamy sides of south Florida, and their
tolerance for repetitive social comment without much style. (Kirkus
Reviews)
A wandering Floridian who made his way home in the early 1970s,
John Rothchild writes about the state with the savvy of a native
and the perspective of an outsider. His personal and historical
travelogue reads alternately like a litany of 20th-century ills and
a Monty Python rendering of the Great American Dream. In Florida,
both versions are true. Settled through the chicanery of a few
enterprising brokers and real estate wizards, Rothchild's Florida
is a civilization built from scratch, out of the most unusual
ingredients. While much of the state seems younger than many of its
inhabitants, he observes, it hosts all the modern demographic,
economic, and social problems. Still, those ills don't dispel the
magic of its sunshine, beaches, and exotic fauna or undermine its
status as a great American myth. Told within the framework of
Rothchild's travels from Miami to the Everglades, around the state
and back again, Up for Grabs is part history, part travelogue, part
journalism, part autobiography--a humorous and appreciative tour of
a society fabricated from a state of mind and erected on land that
was "ninety percent underwater ninety percent of the time." John
Rothchild, a former editor of Washington Monthly, columnist for
Time and Fortune, and contributor to Esquire, Rolling Stone,
Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine, is author or
coauthor of nine books, including A Fool and His Money and Voice of
the River, the autobiography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas. He lives
in Miami Beach, Florida.
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