Word: rothchilds
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NONFICTION: The Chief, Lance Morrow -- Citizen Hughes, Michael Drosnin -- Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, Donald Hall -- Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson -- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi -- Up for Grabs, John Rothchild...
...transformed muck into pay dirt. Huge damp swaths of the stuff were then subdivided and merchandised as paradise. Georgia Poet Sidney Lanier was hired to lure frostbitten Northerners with seductive publicity, and William Jennings Bryan was paid $100,000 a year to tout lots in Coral Gables. "Florida," writes Rothchild, "missed that period of American migration when you could get to know a place before you saw a brochure...
...Everglades City and Miami Beach, his current home. His South is not the storied region of literary tradition. There is a theme-park quality to Florida's past. Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth and apocryphal pirates are turned into roadside attractions. For good- ole-boy authenticity, Rothchild heads past the subdivisions and tourist snares until the signs read BEER, AMMO and WORMS...
...Rothchild spins a tale of the wild, wild South in which motives, loyalties and identities are lost in a tangle of crime and counterinsurgency. The absurdist flavor of his account is best sampled through a procession of shady characters, including "the terrorist pediatrician," a Cuban exile accused of blowing up one of Castro's airliners and firing a bazooka at ships from the causeway linking Miami to Miami Beach...
...Rothchild's pithy style allows him to cover a lot of landfill in a hurry. If his roots seem shallow, it is because he finds no place to sink them deeper. "Florida is spiritually unclaimed," he writes. "There is no harmonic abstraction, no stereotype such as the cowboy, the Yankee trader, the trapper, the woodsman, the planter--no hero of history around which the population can rally." Rothchild feels most at home on the highway, caught between a senior citizen driving his Oldsmobile at 10 m.p.h. and a teenager in a Mercedes closing in from behind...