Download or read book The Swamp Peddlers written by Jason Vuic and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florida has long been a beacon for retirees, but for many, the American dream of owning a home there was a fantasy. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" hawked billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded home site that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result was Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others—sprawling communities with no downtowns, little industry, and millions of residential lots. In The Swamp Peddlers, Jason Vuic tells the raucous tale of the sale of residential lots in postwar Florida. Initially selling cheap homes to retirees with disposable income, by the mid-1950s developers realized that they could make more money selling parcels of land on installment to their customers. These "swamp peddlers" completely transformed the landscape and demographics of Florida, devastating the state environmentally by felling forests, draining wetlands, digging canals, and chopping up at least one million acres into grid-like subdivisions crisscrossed by thousands of miles of roads. Generations of northerners moved to Florida cheaply, but at a huge price: high-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; poorly-regulated development begat environmental destruction, culminating in the perfect storm of the 21st-century subprime mortgage crisis.
Download or read book The Yugo written by Jason Vuic and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand "good" communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you've got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia's nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo . . . at the bottom.
Download or read book The Swamp written by Michael Grunwald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning r"Washington Post" reporter tells the story of the Florida Everglades, from its beginnings as 4,500 off-putting square miles of natural liquid wasteland to the ecological mess it has become. Photos.
Download or read book Lies that Came True written by Eileen Bernard and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Classic Book Jackets written by Thomas Stansfield Hansen and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Salter's life and work bridged two continents and cultures and spanned the political turmoil of the mid-twentieth century. He survived both world wars, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and permanent exile in a new land, but nothing halted his tireless and brilliant design work. Classic Book Jackets tells Salter's story and describes the innovative thinking he brought to his clients and students (including his designation of seven jacket types that are still valid today). It includes more than two hundred reproductions of his finest works as well as a complete catalog of his jackets, designs, and lettering jobs for the book trade."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Sinking in the Swamp written by Lachlan Markay and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of Washington's most meddlesome reporters take readers on a deep dive into the murky underworld of President Trump's Washington. Markay and Suebsaeng dish the hilarious and frightening dirt on the charlatans, conspiracy theorists, ideologues, and run-of-the-mill con artists who have infected the highest echelons of American political power. The result is an uncompromising account of the financial and moral degradation of our capital, told with righteous indignation and through the lens of key power players and foot soldiers whose own antics have often escaped the notice of the overworked press corps. -- adapted from jacket.
Download or read book The Yucks written by Jason Vuic and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friday Night Lights meets The Bad News Bears in “a brisk, warmhearted reminder of how professional sports can occasionally reach stunning unprofessional depths” (Publishers Weekly): the first two seasons with the worst team in NFL history, the hapless, hilarious, and hopelessly winless 1976–1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before and that none will ever likely do again: They lost twenty-six games in a row. This was no ordinary streak. Along with their ridiculous mascot and uniforms, which were known as “the Creamsicles,” the Yucks were a national punch line and personnel purgatory. Owned by the miserly and bulbous-nosed Hugh Culverhouse, the team was the end of the line for Heisman Trophy winner and University of Florida hero Steve Spurrier, and a banishment for former Cowboy defensive end Pat Toomay after he wrote a tell-all book about his time on “America’s Team.” Many players on the Bucs had been out of football for years, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to have to introduce themselves in the huddle. They were coached by the ever-quotable college great John McKay. “We can’t win at home and we can’t win on the road,” he said. “What we need is a neutral site.” But the Bucs were a part of something bigger, too. They were a gambit by promoters, journalists, and civic boosters to create a shared identity for a region that didn’t exist—Tampa Bay. Before the Yucks, “the Bay” was a body of water, and even the worst team in memory transformed Florida’s Gulf communities into a single region with a common cause. The Yucks is “a funny, endearing look at how the Bucs lost their way to success, cementing a region through creamsicle unis and John McKay one-liners” (Sports Illustrated).
Download or read book Bubble in the Sun written by Christopher Knowlton and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression. The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a Vegas: gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now. In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses. Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the decade: the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.
Download or read book Cape Coral written by Chris Wadsworth and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many are surprised to discover that Cape Coral's history dates back further than the boom of the 1960s. Indeed, homesteader families were living a rough-and-tumble life in the Cape's wilderness for much of the 20th century. Still, there is no denying that the city took a turn with the arrival of Jack and Leonard Rosen in 1957. These visionaries brought their Gulf American Land Corporation to Southwest Florida and built a modern city from scratch. Model homes, roads galore, an airport, a police force, the Cape Coral Country Club, the Nautilus Motel, and the famous Rose Gardens-all rising out of the woods on the north shore of the Caloosahatchee River. Hundreds of miles of canals were dug so that nearly every home was on or near the water. Hollywood celebrities turned out to promote properties to Northerners looking for the good life in sunny Florida. It was one of the largest planned developments ever in the United States-and it was a rousing success.
Download or read book Bayou Suzette written by Lois Lenski and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cajun girl tries to keep her family together on the Louisiana bayou It’s been almost 2 years since Suzette’s father caught 2 bullets in his back. Since then, he’s been bed-ridden, too sick to hunt or fish or do any of the things a bayou man must do to keep his family fed. While he heals, Suzette scours the swamps around her house for fish, gators, or anything she can sell to put food on the table. It’s hard, but Suzette is a proud Cajun, and work doesn’t scare her. When an Indian girl appears on the bayou, Suzette finds in her a friend—and maybe a way to save her family. This moving novel lovingly depicts the warmth and vitality of Cajun people and a time when the bayous seemed to stretch forever.
Download or read book White Sox Park s Amazing Vendors written by Lloyd Rutzky and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball lives, whether one interprets that as meaning that the country's national pastime is still breathing and well after nearly two centuries or as a reference to the people who work in the "industry." More than 50 years ago, one young man became employed by the Chicago White Sox and began photographing virtually everybody with whom he worked. His intention was to have pictures of his friends and coworkers for the future. Now, Arcadia Publishing is proud to add Lloyd Rutzky's memories of his "team" experiences to its Images of Modern America series in this volume, a companion to the groundbreaking Wrigley Field's Amazing Vendors, published in 2018.
Download or read book Poland s Crooked Forest written by Rachel Hamby and published by DiscoverRoo. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to the mysterious Crooked Forest in Poland and the debate about what caused this natural phenomenon. Features include a table of contents, fun facts, infographics, Making Connections questions, a glossary, and an index. QR Codes in the book give readers access to book-specific resources to further their learning. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. DiscoverRoo is an imprint of Pop!, a division of ABDO.
Download or read book Locking Up Our Own written by James Forman, Jr. and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTON ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWS' 10 BEST BOOKS LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, CURRENT INTEREST CATEGORY, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZES "Locking Up Our Own is an engaging, insightful, and provocative reexamination of over-incarceration in the black community. James Forman Jr. carefully exposes the complexities of crime, criminal justice, and race. What he illuminates should not be ignored." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative "A beautiful book, written so well, that gives us the origins and consequences of where we are . . . I can see why [the Pulitzer prize] was awarded." —Trevor Noah, The Daily Show Former public defender James Forman, Jr. is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness—and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods. A former D.C. public defender, Forman tells riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims. He writes with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency. Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.
Download or read book Tales of Hope Tastes of Bitterness written by Miriam Driessen and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER – 2020 SEAA's Francis L. Hsu Book Prize Honorable Mention China’s new globalism plays out as much in the lives of ordinary workers who shoulder the task of implementing infrastructure projects in the world as in the upper echelons of power. Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and state entities. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia sheds light on situations of contact in which disparate cultures meet and wrestle with each other in highly asymmetric relations of power. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism. “A trailblazing ethnography that at once humanizes and complicates our understanding of the China-Africa encounter. Taking us deep into the personal, social, and working life worlds of Chinese and Ethiopian construction staff and laborers, Driessen mounts a powerful challenge against the clichéd narrative of China in Africa as a case of neocolonialism masterminded by Beijing.” —Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA, author of The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa “China rapidly transformed itself from an international aid recipient into a world-leading aid provider. This seemingly epochal shift, as this book powerfully demonstrates, is much more complex and less predictable than it appears to be. Driessen’s wonderfully perceptive ethnography and insightful analyses pave a new path in understanding ongoing global changes.” —Biao Xiang, University of Oxford, author of Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry
Download or read book The Book of Immortality written by Adam Gollner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of one of the most universal human obsessions charts the rise of longevity science from its alchemical beginnings to modern-day genetic interventions and enters the world of those whose lives are shaped by a belief in immortality.
Download or read book Why We Left written by Joanna Brooks and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joanna Brooks reveals the harsh realities behind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration--and dismantles the idea that these immigrants were drawn to America as a land of opportunity. Brooks follows American folk ballads back across the Atlantic, uncovering an archaeology of the worldviews of America's earliest immigrants and a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.
Download or read book As Fast as Words Could Fly written by Pamela Tuck and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Mason Steele, an African American boy in 1960s Greenville, North Carolina, who relies on his inner strength and his typing skills to break racial barriers after he begins attending a whites-only high school.
