The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
Author: Michael Grunwald
The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it. The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man's abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America's most beguiling but least understood patches of land.
The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished.
Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting,Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
Michael Grunwald is a reporter at The Washington Post. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, and many other awards. He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez.
Visit his website at michaelgrunwald.com.
The New York Times - William Grimes
Mr. Grunwald, a terrific writer, moves along at a cracking pace. The dredges dig, the railroad advances, the politicians scheme and the dreamers paint their Technicolor fantasies. There is a feverish quality to the endless engineering assaults, the mad plans to rechannel the circulatory system of the Everglades, the blind determination to ignore the forces of nature. For example, no one quite understood that South Florida often experienced powerful hurricanes, so hundreds of poor farmers died in 1926 and 1927 when Lake Okeechobee overflowed.
The Washington Post - John G. Mitchell
In recent years, writers have devoted a lot of ink to the tortured history of south Florida's Everglades. But no one has nailed that story as effectively, as hauntingly and as dramatically as Michael Grunwald does in The Swamp , a brilliant work of research and reportage about the evolution of a reviled bog into America's -- if not the world's -- most valuable wetland.
Publishers Weekly
Washington Post reporter Grunwald brings the zeal of his profession-and the skill that won him a Society of Environmental Journalists Award in 2003-to this enthralling story of "the river of grass" that starry-eyed social engineers and greedy developers have diverted, drained and exploited for more than a century. In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp's wildlife. But in a remarkable political and environmental turnaround, chronicled here with a Washington insider's savvy, Republicans and Democrats came together in 2000 to launch the largest ecosystem restoration project in America's history. This detailed account doesn't shortchange the environmental story-including an account of the senseless fowl hunts that provoked abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1877 broadside "Protect the Birds." But Grunwald's emphasis on the role politics played in first despoiling and now reclaiming the Everglades gives this important book remarkable heft. 18 pages of b&w photos; 7 maps. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A lively appreciation of the Everglades as an ecosystem worthy of care and protection-quite a turnaround in attitude, as Washington Post reporter Grunwald reveals. The natural Everglades encompasses an area twice the size of New Jersey, and it lacks both immediately spectacular features and elevation: One "pass" there is marked at a mere three feet above sea level. Yet huge quantities of freshwater slowly roll down the Everglades; as Grunwald writes, "a raindrop that fell in its headwaters in central Florida could have taken an entire year to dribble down to its estuaries at the tip of the peninsula." Nineteenth-century white explorers damned the "Sea of Grass" for its heat, mosquitoes, vast store of reptiles, renegade Indians and runaway slaves, but speculators and capitalists came along who recognized a couple of salient facts: Rich in organic peat, the Everglades could be an agricultural paradise, and it could sustain whole cities. All that was needed was to remake the place entirely-drain the swamps, build vast canals and railroads, divide it into cozy lots. Grunwald's account of the con games and fly-by-nights that made modern South Florida possible is a learned entertainment, though it becomes somewhat less amusing once it's known that the same actors and forces are in play today; one illustrative moment comes when Jeb Bush, governor of Florida and brother of the president, came close to selling off Florida's water rights in the Everglades for the pittance offered by a little company called Azurix, "an aggressive new player in the $400 billion global water market"-and, as it happens, a subsidiary of Enron. Happily, the deal didn't go through. More happily still, Grunwald writes thatmany wide-ranging measures to help restore the Everglades have been successful. Still, "drive through the region's strip-mall hellscapes," Grunwald concludes, and it's clear that much remains to be done to save the Everglades. This lucid history and call to arms is an essential companion to that work.
New interesting textbook: To Serve with Love or Simply Shrimp
Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times
Author: Helen Thomas
"Thank You, Mr. President."
From the woman who has reported on every president from Kennedy to Clinton comes a privileged glimpse into the White House -- and a telling record of the ever-changing relationship between the presidency and the press.
Helen Thomas wanted to be a reporter from her earliest years. She turned a copy-aide job at the Washington Daily News into a powerful and successful career spanning thirty-seven years and eight U.S. presidents. Assigned to the White House press corps in 1961. Thomas was the first woman to close a press conference with "Thank you. Mr. President." She was also the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association and the first woman member, later president, of the Gridiron Club.
In this revealing memoir, which includes hundreds of anecdotes, observations, and personal details. Thomas looks back on a career spent with presidents at home and abroad, on the ground and in the air. Providing a unique view of the past four decades of presidential history. Front Row at the White House offers a seasoned study of the relationship between the chief executive officer and the press -- a relationship that is sometimes uneasy, sometimes playful, yet always integral to the democratic process.
Publishers Weekly
The veteran Washington reporter gives her account of instant history at the White House, the result of her fly-on-the-wall perch covering the administrations of every president since JFK for United Press International. Thomas is always on hand with a jaded eye, a cynical word and a probing question. And her story gives a view of the Fourth Estate surprisingly dissimilar to those that predominate today. In Thomass telling, the press is an institution, one of the many necessities of a democratic society. Gossip and scandal dont drive events, she asserts, as much as the desire to get the story and tell it first. Contained within her memoirs are remarkable recollections of Lyndon Johnson, who investigated the press as much as it investigated him; of Richard Nixon, who asks Thomas to say a prayer for me in one of Watergates darkest hours; of Martha Mitchell, a cabinet wife (of Nixons John Mitchell) who got sucked in and spat out by Beltway politics; and of First Ladies who offer birthday greetingsand others who close off their private lives. While the book is woefully thin on personal motivation and inner thoughts (one of the shortest chapters is on Thomass husband, former AP White House reporter Doug Cornell), it provides a sharp chronicle of the nations recent historyand of the crusade of women reporters to be considered the equal or better of their male counterparts.
Library Journal
Thomas was the first woman reporter to cover the Presidency, a job she has been doing since 1961.
Chicago Sun Times
The first lady of United Press International packs a half a century of history into just 387 pages...her snapshots of White House figures and would-bes will delight news junkies and history lovers.
USA Today
A terrific read.
Kirkus Reviews
A straightforward, though not reflective, memoir from Thomas (Dateline: White House, 1975) on the best beat in the world—covering every president from JFK to Clinton for United Press International. The daughter of Lebanese parents, Thomas grew up in Detroit. She came to her passion for journalism early, having written for her high school and college papers. After covering such beats as the Department of Justice and Capitol Hill, she was assigned to the White House in 1961. As the dean of the White House press corps and the person who delivers the final "Thank you, Mr. President" at press conferences, Thomas has become an instantly recognized fixture among the gaggle who report on the presidency. She has won the respect—and often incurred the wrath—of presidents, first ladies, and press secretaries for her bulldog tenacity and her unenthralled view of their work. Many of her best stories come when she sticks to her aim to provide an impressionistic view of these remarkable men and women (e.g., a scandal-scarred Richard Nixon startling her by asking for her prayers). But her assessments of presidents are conventional, and she is rarely critical of her profession's shortcomings. For instance, she acknowledges that she enraged LBJ by revealing daughter Luci's wedding plans before the latter had the chance to discuss them with her father. She fails to see that such matters have nothing whatever to do with her aim to hold government officials accountable and to explain their actions and policies. Moreover, while proud of her firsts as a female reporter (e.g., the first woman recipient of the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award), she reveals little about what sustainedher against male chauvinists of the media. A crisply written account of jousting between presidents and press, but without much insight into these two institutions that Thomas so clearly reveres. (16 pages b&w photos)
What People Are Saying
Judy Woodruff
No one has the 'insider's' perspective on our last eight presidents that Helen Thomas has...a must read.
— CNN
Table of Contents:
CONTENTS
Foreword
1. Beginnings
2. Washington: The Early Years
3. A Little Rebellion Now and Then
4. New Frontiers
5. Where Everybody Knows My Name
6. Access Denied
7. "And I'd Like a Follow-up"
8. Not Exactly Nine to Five
9. On the Road
10. "She Told the Truth"
11. Doug
12. The Smallest Sorority
13. "A Splendid Misery"
14. Short Takes on Long Views
Notes Index
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