BOOKPATHS

Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales, Florida, U.S.

Editor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and philanthropist, Edward Bok (1863-1930) made a gift of the Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, to the American people “in gratitude for the opportunity they had given him.”  Now a National Historic Landmark, Bok Tower Gardens, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., is open every day of the year from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; the Visitor Center is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Visitor information is available on their website.

In 1921, Edward W. Bok was spending the winter months in the residential mountain lake community located adjacent to one of the highest hills of Florida’s Lake Wales Ridge, 298 feet above sea level. He enjoyed taking evening walks to the top of ‘Iron Mountain,’ among the virgin pines and sandhill scrub, to enjoy Florida’s dramatic sunsets and bird life. The idea came to him to preserve this hilltop and create a bird sanctuary – a place of beauty, serenity and peace. – from Bok Tower Gardens Website

(Photograph from the National Park Service website)

Sugarloaf Key, Florida, U.S.

Author Barbara Ehrenreich “savors life ‘up the Keys.’”

The second, and last, place we looked at was on Sugarloaf Key, a patch of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico from the lone highway connecting the necklace of islands that make up Florida's Keys. We drove to the end of the paved road, then onto a dirt road cutting through a low jungle of indigenous buttonwoods, poisonwoods, sea grapes and thatch palms. At the end of that was a pleasant gray house linked to the water by a boardwalk and dock, and at the end of the dock was a revelation: more than 180 degrees of turquoise water dotted with a series of tiny emerald mangrove islands. Live here, said a voice from the blue-green vastness—whatever it takes. – from “Sugarloaf Key, Florida: Keeping Good Company,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, Smithsonian Magazine

Florida, U.S.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston  (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008; first published in 1937)

Their Eyes Were Watching God follows Janie Crawford on her journey of self-discovery through three marriages, finally finding the kind of love she longs for when she meets and marries “the roustabout” Tea Cake in her early forties.  Descriptions of people and place pull readers into the pages, from the “West Florida” landscape of Janie’s birth and youth; to Eatonville, the "all-black" community where the author grew up; to the Everglades, where “hordes of workers” gather to cut sugar cane and beans in season.  Hurston's classic novel is a memorable and enriching read.

To Janie’s strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new.  Big Lake Okechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big everything.  Weeds that did well to grow waist high up the state were eight and often ten feet tall down there.  Ground so rich that everything went wild.  Volunteer cane just taking the place.  Dirt roads so rich and black that a half mile of it would have fertilized a Kansas wheat field.  Wild cane on either side of the road hiding the rest of the world.  People wild too.  – from Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Zora Neale Hurston: the Official Zora Neale Hurston Website

Welcome to the Town of Eatonville: the Oldest Incorporated African American Municipality in America

Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.

Author Jeff VanderMeer shares “his thoughts on books and the secrets of his adopted home city, Tallahassee, Florida.”

“This is a city teeming with writers… At Florida State University, you have Robert Olen Butler, poet David Kirby and Mark Winegardner (best known for literary fiction until he did the 'Godfather' spinoffs), Bob Shacochis and Julianna Baggott, for example. Daniel Maier-Katkin, another professor, just sold his account of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger to a major publisher, so he'll be high-profile soon. Outside of the university, there's Mark Mustian, also a city commissioner, who just hit it big with a sale of a novel to Putnam (a writer to watch next year). I'm probably the resident 'fantasist mascot,' so to speak, and then there are host of others at the university and elsewhere working in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.” – Jeff VanderMeer, Los Angeles Times Interview with Carolyn Kellogg

Vero Beach, Florida, U.S.

Charles McGrath talks with Carl Hiaasen about his new book, The Downhill Lie: a Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport, “part memoir, with reminiscences about his father” and partly an “account of how he took up golf again after what he calls ‘a much-needed layoff of 32 years.’”

“It’s [Quail Valley Golf Club] in the middle of nowhere, a former citrus grove outside Vero Beach, and the entrance is guarded by a remote-control gate. BMWs and Mercedes S.U.V.’s gleam in the parking lot. In the clubhouse the heads of a moose, an elk and some African-looking ungulate gaze down on the dining room, and the men’s locker room is graced with a stuffed lion and a reared-up bear. You can imagine that Palmer Stoat, from the Hiaasen novel Sick Puppy, who tries to arrange a big-game hunt in the Florida wilds, might feel right at home here." – from “It’s Florida. It’s Hiaasen. It’s Golf?” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

Florida

Lois Lowry explains why we “must read” The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

“Then, as my mother read those first few pages of The Yearling, I saw blue-gray smoke rising from the chimney of a simple cabin, and watching the smoke drift into the sky was a boy named Jody Baxter. I recognized him right away. He was so like me: skinny, blond, solitary. I moved, as my mother read the words, into the clearing in the Florida swampland where the Baxters lived their hardscrabble lives. I could hear the insects buzzing and the bubbling sound of the little spring, and I could see the glisten of the dark magnolia leaves and smell the thick pines” – from “Finding a Familiar Loneliness in The Yearling,” by Lois Lowry, NPR All Things Considered

Bookpath: Indian River, Florida

Oranges, by John McPhee (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reissue 1975)

First published in 1966, Oranges, initially "conceived as a short magazine article,” was one of the first books written by the prolific John McPhee. In his hands “the botany, history and industry” of oranges becomes fascinating. Although McPhee follows the migration of oranges worldwide, time spent in Indian River, Florida, is of particular interest as he pursues botanists, pickers, packers, and growers.

John McPhee

"With aerospace and realty interests preempting the northern shores of the Indian River, new plantings have been made in the south. Until 1959, all groves were within two or three miles of the ocean. They had to be, since most of the length of the river is paralleled, a couple of miles inland, by vast savannas, which are largely under water nine months of the year.

Much of the west bank of the river is a kind of loaf of ground, described by Floridians as a 'bluff' even when it rises only thirteen feet above sea level. But it is high ground indeed compared to what lies beyond it. The savannas reach out to the western horizon, low and flat, filled with saw grass and cat-o'-nine-tails, small cypress trees, and occasional hammocks covered with cabbage palms. Otter live in the savannas, and alligators, wildcat, quail, deer, rabbit, wild turkey, water moccasins, and rattlesnakes.” – from Oranges, by John McPhee

Cross Creek, Florida

“Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of a small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon.” – from Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, D.C. In 1928, she purchased 72 acres at Cross Creek, Florida. She lived there for 25 years, describing the landscape in Cross Creek and in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Yearling. Her house and land now comprise Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park, “restored and…preserved as it was when she lived here.” Visitors are welcome daily from 9:00 to 5:00 p.m.

“A spring as clear as well water bubbled up from nowhere in the sand. It was as though the banks cupped green leafy hands to hold it. There was a whirlpool where the water rose from the earth. Grains of sand boiled in it. Beyond the bank, the parent spring bubbled up at a higher level, cut itself a channel through white limestone and began to run rapidly down-hill to make a creek. The creek joined Lake George, Lake George was part of the St. John’s River, the great river flowed northward and into the sea.” – from The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The Everglades, Florida

The Swamp : the Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, by Michael Grunwald (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2006)

In The Swamp : the Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, Washington Post writer, Michael Grunwald, has written “the story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades.” He transports readers from the Ice Age to the present, “illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America’s most beguiling but least understood patches of land.” Grunwald’s book should be required reading for all who care about the survival of the Everglades and the planet itself.

This is the story of the Everglades, from useless bog to national treasure, from its creation to its destruction to its potential resurrection. It is the story of a remarkable swath of real estate and the remarkable people it has attracted, from the aboriginals who created the continent's first permanent settlement in the Everglades, to the U.S. soldiers who fought a futile war of ethnic cleansing in the Everglades, to the dreamers and schemers who have tried to settle, drain, tame, develop, sell, preserve, and restore the Everglades. It's a story about the pursuit of paradise and the ideal of progress, which once inspired the degradation of nature, and now inspires its restoration. It's a story about hubris and unintended consequences, about the mistakes man has made in his relationship with nature and his unprecedented efforts to fix them.” – from The Swamp : the Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, by Michael Grunwald

Publisher's Website