Everything old is new again, or rather, of new pertinence in the light of current events.  I’ve been finding this theme in a lot of our latest pieces on FBR.  Antolin Garcia Carbonell shows how research about projects built in the Depression, like that done for the essays in The New Deal in South Florida, can inform thinking about how to take action now, while Molly McGreevy’s look at Great Houses of Florida prompted some thoughts on how pauses in building let us appreciate and save what we have.  In Nick Garnett’s reconsideration of Elmore Leonard’s Stick we get a vision of the gumption people need when starting over. John Bond’s piece on Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen's novel which reworks and revises three predecessors, looks at the myth-making that underlies all Florida storytelling, whether we call it fiction or not.  And I’m proud to announce our new feature, “American History, Florida Style,” a memoir piece by Dan Wakefield, which shows with rueful wit how different the old lessons look from here.

    —Lynne Barrett

The winners of the Florida Book Awards for 2008 are posted in the column to the right.  Lots more information about the awards is at the Florida Book Awards website.

—Lynne Barrett

The Evenings With... (famous authors) have started, and the booths for the street fair are going up: It’s time for the Book Fair again.  Last year for the first time we live-blogged the fair and found that people from around the world checked in to read about it.  This year is the 25th annual Miami Book Fair International and we’ll have FBR staff on the ground to cover it.  Our first report is up on the FBR Reports: Miami Book Fair page.  But we depend, too, on comments from Fair-goers, visiting authors, and booksellers.  We’ll have our “blogging gator” set up at the Con-Jel-Co/Gulf Stream Magazine booth with forms where you can give us your memories, observations, and thoughts about the speakers, the exhibits, the food.  Make yourself part of the record and stop by!  And those who are far away can email us at FLBookreview@aol.com: What’s your first, funniest, or most cherished Book Fair memory?
    —Lynne Barrett

The haunting season is here!

          After reading John Marc Carr's informative book, Haunted Fort Lauderdale, I decided to take the next step--I went on his ghost tour. I gathered my friends Kathy, Yaddyra and Lou (I was too scared to go alone) and we met up with Carr and other locals and tourists in front of the Cheesecake Factory one Saturday night in July. Our first stop was the Stranahan House.
          I discovered that Carr goes into even more detail on the tour than he does in the book. For example, Carr brought an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) player with him, and allowed us to listen to Ivy Stranahan's ghostly voice. He also goes into more detail about the history of the various locations-we learned much about a young woman named Pink who died in the Stranahan house, jilted by her two-timing husband. While the book briefly touched on the incident, on the tour, Carr's detailed account made us feel the pain of the poor young woman's final hours as he described her bleeding to death after childbirth.
            A couple odd things happened on the tour. First, a teenage girl among us fainted in front of the Stranahan House, just as Carr was beginning to tell us about the ghost of Ivy Stranahan. Yaddyra and Lou claim it was odd how she fainted-it was in slow motion, as if some unseen force was gently lowering her to the ground. At the King Cromartie House, which is said to be haunted by a "pink lady," several members of our group claim to have seen the curtains moving slightly. I have to say I didn't see anything I couldn't chalk up to an air conditioning vent, but Carr explained that on a previous tour, people saw the curtains open more dramatically, as if by unseen hands. A video of this can be seen on Carr's MySpace page. 
           Can I tell you first hand that Fort Lauderdale is haunted? Nope. But I can tell you this--a dinner out on Las Olas Boulevard will never be the same for me.

           --Susan Parsons

 

           As Florida counts down the days until hurricane season ends we remember that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the tragic 1928 hurricane that was perhaps best memorialized in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's characters, black migrant workers, travel from northern Florida to Lake Okeechobee to supplement their meager incomes, only to meet their deaths when the hurricane strikes. Nonfiction accounts of the storm include Disasters and Heroic Rescues: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival Florida by E. Lynne Wright which summarizes the events of the storm. "...Radio reports about a storm doing extensive damage in Puerto Rico" reached the Southeast coast Florida. "Some took half-hearted precautions, but mostly people simply remained alert...in the midst of a [radio] announcement that there was no longer a danger to Florida [a radio announcer] broke off in mid-sentence, saying the storm had hit Palm Beach and it was devastating." Wright explains that an already saturated Lake Okeechobee poured into surrounding communities when "dikes being banks of muck from five feet to nine feet high" were no match for the storm. Entire families were lost as they struggled to survive the winds and rains on their rooftops. Wright estimates the death toll between 1800 and 3000.
           Two books chronicle the storm in detail. Black Cloud by Eliot Kleinberg includes a first hand account from Carmen Salvatore, a former soldier and survivor of the storm whose house was ripped up from the foundation during the storm. Robert Mykle's Killer Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 reveals photos of downtown Palm Beach, which was reduced to rubble. All of the books explain that the storm showed the disparity between blacks and whites at the time. While bodies of the whites were buried in a local graveyard, the blacks were thrown into a mass grave. Black workers were instrumental in the clean up. Wright explains that a temporary lift of Prohibition was permitted in the area because "no one, including officers of the law, would deny workers a drink of whiskey if would help them" cope with "the hard physical labor, the heat, the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the stench and sight of decomposed bodies and body parts, the occasional heartbreak of identifying those bodies or body parts of those as belonging to someone they loved..."

       --Susan Parsons