[bksvol-discuss] Re: scanning request
- From: Carrie Karnos <ckarnos@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 23:11:16 -0700 (PDT)
THE SWAMP is not on the New York Times bestseller lists yet, either hardcover
or paperback nonfiction. I don't know if it'll get on or not. Do you want to
wait a week to see if it does get on one of the lists? You'll be happy to know
that I've convinced the powers that be, that if an excellent-rated bestseller
is already in the collection, we needn't replace it.
Carrie
Jill O'Connell <jillocon@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In my opinion, the best person to scan this and other new highly rated books
is Carrie. This is because the book when scanned by the office's excellent
equipment will almost certainly replace the scan done by one of us. I had
this happen and although I still received the credit, I will not be spending
my time scanning another best selling new book.
----- Original Message -----
From: "cheryl fogle"
To: ;
Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 6:34 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] scanning request
> The book described in the following review seems interesting. I'd be
> willing to validate if someone wants to scan.
>
>
> Washington Post Book Review
>
> April 2, 2006
>
> Muddy Waters
> In this rousing history, the marsh known as the River of Grass flows into
> the
> barrel of pork.
>
> Reviewed by John G. Mitchell
>
> THE SWAMP
>
> The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
>
> By Michael Grunwald
>
> Simon & Schuster. 450 pp. $27
>
> 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.
>
> Grunwald, a prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, explains that
> the
> true, original Everglades were not a swamp in any botanically correct
> sense
> of the word but rather a marsh, "a vast sheet of shallow water spread
> across
> a seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass," often called the River
> of Grass. But Grunwald's sweep is bigger than that. It embraces the entire
> south Florida hydrosystem, a 100-mile long funnel that seeps from the
> Kissimmee
> lakes near Orlando, spills into Lake Okeechobee, then overflows through
> the
> Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp to the mangroves of Florida Bay and
> the
> Gulf of Mexico. At least that's the way it used to be. Now, despite recent
> efforts to undo some of the engineered damage inflicted on it over the
> past
> 150 years, the swamp remains imperiled. "Half the Everglades is gone,"
> Grunwald writes.
>
> "The other half is an ecological mess. Wading birds no longer darken the
> skies above it." Okeechobee is choking on algal blooms. Sprawl continues
> to
> nibble
> the edge of the Big Cypress. Unsustainable communities "are at risk from
> the
> next killer hurricane -- and the one after that."
>
> Risk has been south Florida's leitmotif since Europeans first pushed their
> way into its wild interior. The region was certainly risky for the
> Seminole
> Indians,
> who barely escaped annihilation by the U.S. Army in the 1830s.
> Unconquered, a
> few hundred managed to hang on in the Big Cypress. Later in the 19th
> century,
> risk shifted to the great flocks of wading birds -- spoonbills, flamingos,
> herons and egrets -- whose plumage was thought better adorning milady's
> stylish
> hats. Before laws brought that slaughter to a halt, one report fixed the
> kill
> at 5 million birds a year.
>
> The most enduring risks were framed by the dreamers and schemers who
> believed
> that the Everglades must be drained to make the country fit for settlement
> and cultivation. Grunwald chronicles each successive (though not always
> successful) effort to dry out the swamp and describes the devastating
> hurricanes
> of 1926 and 1928, which uncorked the backed-up waters of Lake Okeechobee,
> drowning nearly 3,000 people (mostly poor blacks -- a foretaste of
> Hurricane
> Katrina) and prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a
> four-story
> concrete dike around the lake, thus stifling much of the flow to the
> Everglades.
>
> Grunwald is at his best in dissecting the political wars that rattled the
> region after Everglades National Park was established at the toe of the
> hydrosystem
> in 1947 -- which meant that upstream city folks and cattlemen and sugar
> growers got first dibs on releases of fresh water while the park had to
> settle
> for the leftovers, now tainted with pesticides and fertilizers. Meanwhile,
> the Corps of Engineers, presiding over "the largest earth-moving effort
> since
> the Panama Canal," crisscrossed the peninsula with hundreds of miles of
> levees and canals designed not so much to save human lives as to boost the
> Sunshine
> State's economy.
>
> A reader might become numb from Grunwald's stacking of the details were it
> not for his skill at profiling the characters who, by the late 1960s, were
> trying
> to turn the flow of events back Nature's way. Among them: activist-writer
> Marjory Stoneman Douglas, grand dame of the River of Grass; and Nathaniel
> Pryor
> Reed, the "blue-blooded outdoorsman" whose 6-foot-5-inch frame "evoked a
> great blue heron" and whose eloquence convinced two pro-development
> Republican
> politicians, Florida Gov. Claude Kirk Jr. and U.S. Interior Secretary
> Walter
> Hickel, to scuttle Dade County's plan to build the world's largest jetport
> just a coconut-throw north of Everglades National Park.
>
> In 1992, Hurricane Andrew leveled Homestead Air Force Base, located
> between
> Everglades and Biscayne national parks. Afterward, Dade County's high
> rollers,
> including some who had lost out on that earlier jetport scheme, said this
> would be a fine place to build a big commercial airport -- never mind that
> the
> result would darken both parks' skies with 600 flights a day. The Clinton
> administration juggled that one for several years even as it cobbled
> together
> a $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and billed it as
> the
> most expensive and extensive environmental initiative in history.
> Calculated
> to undo much of the damage inflicted on the 'glades over the years, the
> restoration plan was unveiled by Vice President Al Gore in West Palm Beach
> in
> 1998.
> Environmentalists cheered.
>
> But few Florida enviros cheered for Gore in 2000. The greenest
> presidential
> candidate in American history declined to renounce the Homestead jetport
> and
> was punished for it. According to Grunwald, of the 96,000 votes received
> by
> Ralph Nader in Florida that November, some 10,000 were probably
> attributable
> to Gore's waffling on the airport. And the final irony? Four days before
> Clinton turned over the Oval Office to the anti-green George W. Bush,
> Clinton's
> administration announced that the Homestead deal was dead in the water --
> what little there was left of it. *
>
> John G. Mitchell, a former editor at Newsweek and National Geographic, has
> been writing about the Everglades since 1967.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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