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A checklist for Floridians

Native or transplant, you should expand your library with these titles, each of which has something to tell about the state.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published November 4, 2004

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	[Times files]
	Learn a little about where you live with Jeff Klinkenberg’s Seasons of Real Florida, a work born of a lifetime of reading and writing about the state.

As someone who has spent a lifetime writing about Real Florida, I have found inspiration in many, many books about our state. Here's a list of works that should be on every Floridian's shelf.

* Travels, William Bartram, 1791. A self-trained botanist, Bartram toured the Southeast, including Florida, in 1774 and then took his sweet time writing up his notes back home in Philadelphia. Readers continue to debate the strange combination of science and the transcendental in his descriptions of flora, fauna and humanity. Much of what he wrote about alligators holds up in scientific circles today even though he frequently makes them sound like fire-breathing dragons.

* Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, 1937. This brilliant novel captures African-American life in rural Central Florida on the eve of the Depression. Controversial then - she wrote much of it in black dialect and felt no need to idealize lives - it is considered an earthy masterpiece today. The novel's terrifying conclusion depicts the death of thousands of migrant workers in the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane.

* The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, 1938. Rawlings wrote a number of fine books, including Cross Creek and Cross Creek Cookery, but this was her shining moment, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that describes a boy's beautiful and heart-breaking coming of age and the hardscrabble 19th-century Cracker life. Marketed today as a book for kids, it is a complicated story with multifaceted characters that deserves a wider readership.

* WPA Guide To Florida, various authors, 1939. Shamefully out of print, the book was part of a New Deal series to help out-of-work authors. The Florida entry is an entertaining and authoritative history of places, people and folkways. The great Florida folklorist Stetson Kennedy was an editor; some wonderful stuff was compiled by the college-trained anthropologist better known for her novels, Zora Neale Hurston.

* Everglades: River of Grass, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 1947. The genius of this elegantly written book is its declaration that the Everglades is a magnificent river worthy of protection, not a lowly swamp waiting to be drained and exploited, as a lot of people (mostly developers) saw it. Florida's environmental movement was born on the day this book was published.

* Dictionary of Fishes, Rube Allyn, 1948. Made obsolete by dozens of excellent modern field guides, this out-of-print volume is a classic - despite its blurry photographs and primitive drawings. Allyn, the late outdoors writer at the St. Petersburg Times, was among other things a teller of tall tales. That was part of this book's unintentional charm: You felt as if you were learning about fish and fishing at the knee of a captain named Old Salty. Generations of baby boomers, mostly boys, grew up fighting in the back seat of their dad's Nash Ramblers over this book, fishing poles sticking out the rear windows.

* Oranges, John McPhee, 1975. This started as a New Yorker magazine article about fresh-squeezed orange juice but evolved into a fascinating book. It captures a time and place in Florida now gone - a time when growing oranges was mostly a family business operated by people who had grown up in it and loved it. A few such farmers hang on today, but for the most part citrus growing is an agribusiness where only profit matters. When McPhee wrote this, farmers didn't carry laptops.

* Condominium, John D. MacDonald, 1977. The author is better known for his wonderful Travis McGee detective series, but this is one of the great muckraking novels in Florida history, our version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The slaughterhouse in MacDonald's work is not a Chicago meat-packing plant but a badly constructed, let's-fleece-the-old-folks condo in Southwest Florida - with a Category 5 hurricane bearing down. If this doesn't scare you, nothing will.

* Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen, 1987. In this wicked, take-no prisoners novel, Florida's own Jonathan Swift captures truth-is-stranger-than-fiction Miami. Rapacious developers, despoilers, hustlers and dunderheads meet their just desserts at the jaws of reptiles both rubber and otherwise. Even better, the hero turns out to be, ahem, a journalist.

* Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen, 1991. The Long Island author, no stranger to Florida, writes about the nation's last frontier - the Ten Thousand Islands of the Everglades, where escaped outlaw Ed Watson befriended and terrified neighbors who felt the need to gun him down in 1910. Nothing is simple here: Matthiessen presents the novel as an oral history told by people who knew Watson or thought they knew him. It's a Rashomon masterpiece of opposing points of view about the same subject. Can any of us really hope to know another person?

* Florida: A Short History, Michael Gannon, 1993. This is hardly the only book you should ever read about Florida history, but it is an excellent place to start. Hard to believe, but in 182 clearly written pages the author covers five centuries of what happened, when, and to whom. And leaves you wanting more.

* A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden, Archie Carr, 1994. The late University of Florida herpetologist was one of the great science writers of the 20th century. The winner of an O. Henry award, Carr in this collection of old and new essays makes you laugh and think. He also insists that wild Florida, though battered and bruised by civilization, is far from gone.

* Anna In The Tropics, Nilo Cruz, 2002. Born in Cuba, raised in South Florida, fascinated by the romantic culture of the old cigar-making businesses of Ybor City, Cruz wrote this play for a small Miami theater and won a Pulitzer for drama. See the play, by all means. But read it too. It poetically captures a time when cigars were rolled by hand and illiterate workers were educated by "lectors" who read political tracts, soap operas and classics that included Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the inspiration for the play.

At a glance

Jeff Klinkenberg appears at 2:45 p.m. Saturday in Sheen Auditorium.

[Last modified November 3, 2004, 12:51:18]