Al Burt’s Florida: Snowbirds, Sand Castles, and Self-Rising Crackers.
first edition
1997 · Gainesville
by Burt, Al.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1997). First Edition, Review Copy, with Publisher’s letter laid-in. Octavo, blue cloth (hardcover), xi + 182 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: As a roving reporter for The Miami Herald from 1973 to 1995, Al Burt traveled all of Florida, studying it with the insight of a native and the detached eye of the foreign correspondent he had been. During those years, he observed connections with the state’s past and speculated about its future and, while he was at it, took note of the human frailties and heroisms he witnessed every day. Al Burt’s Florida is like a family portrait, a loving but not uncritical view of a complex and fascinating state. Burt’s portrait combines vignettes of notable Floridianas -- some famous, like Ed Ball, but most better known locally -- with those of the state’s many special places: Okeechobee in the teens and twenties, Miami Beach in the fifties (when dinner in Havana was only a $26plane ride away), Wakulla Springs when it served as Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan movie set, modern-day Tallahassee with its formailty and grace. Al Burt himself emerges from this landscape as the remarkable, engaging, and passionate Floridiana he is. He takes us in hand, starting from his headquarters in the north Florida scrub, on a tour of the charm, substance, and fantasy that are Florida, yesterday and today. And always, he dwells with greatest affection on the smaller places, the real places, the anchors of old Florida -- and on those folks who do their best to preserve them. In the process he captures what few have expressed -- a sense of Florida as home. (Inventory #: 8585bd)