Florida Books

This is a very useful book with 340 different course descriptions and easy-to-read, color maps showing where the courses are located. In addition, it lets you in on how to obtain discounted greens fees so you can play a lot of courses--at least come of the time--for less than $25. And it fits in your pocket or golf bag.

This is an easy to use reference guide packed with information on golf courses in central Florida. It includes maps and detailed information on the courses, cost, the names of the golf pros etc... A must if you are a golfer planning a trip to Florida.

1979 was my first introduction in person to Bob Graham. The circumstances were odd, but ever since then, I have come to appreciate his service to Florida and to the nation.

On May 25, 1979, John Spenkelink became the first inmate to be executed in Florida following the resumption of capital punishment. The night before was an all night vigil in front of the Governor's Mansion. I was there. Bob - against the advise of his advisers - walked out the front door of the mansion to speak with us.

Subsequent to that I had many opportunities to speak with and to observe him up close. Reading this book though has - with the hindsight of history - helped me to better realize what a gem both Florida and the nation has in Bob Graham.

Bob, thank you.

And by the way, last night at the Florida Wine Festival - a fund-raiser for the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee - I won the dinner with you and three of my friends at the Governor's Club in Tallahassee. Looking forward!

And thank you S. V. Date for a most informative and well written book.

Next book for me to read is your newest book about the real (and scary) Jeb Bush.

__________________________________


Regarding Scharlette Holdman, who is cited in this book:

First a brief introduction: From 1986 - 1992 I was employed as an investigator at the Office of Capital Collateral Representative (CCR) in Tallahassee, Florida, where Scharlette Holdman worked as the supervisor of the investigators from October 1985 - March 1988.

I have known Scharlette since the mid-1970s. Her office, the Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, was in the same wing of the Petroleum Building as my office at Common Cause in Florida, where I volunteered.

David von Drehle's excellent book "Among the Lowest of the Dead" provides the best history and analysis of the Florida death penalty, with Michael Mello's books a close second. Part of each of these books is about Scharlette Holdman. A bit of the negative aspects:

When Scharlette had essentially declared war upon CCR in 1987 and thereafter, some of us decided to investigate her background given some things that we had heard. Low and behold, Scharlette's claim of a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii and a Master's Degree from Memphis State (now University of Memphis) don't exist. A claimed undergraduate degree from Memphis State: I no longer recall if this was confirmed by the university.

We used Scharlette's Social Security number, her maiden name and her married name -- with all this information, both universities had no record of Scharlette having received any degrees from these institutions.

As I understand Scharlette, she needed the "degrees" to confer upon her "credentials" that she really never needed as she is indeed then and now a national expert on capital mitigation, litigation, etc. However Scharlette can be deceptive, as her lack of a PhD and Masters so demonstrates. Even today she claims to have the degrees as when she gives presentations regarding capital cases, she is identified as "Dr." A key word search of her name will bring up some of the presentations that she has made in the past several years with the title "Dr." preceding her name.

If she has received any honorary or other degrees since 1990, that would be new information for me. If so, please let me know: P.O. Box 38458, Tallahassee, FL 32315-8458.

S.V. Date's book is an easy read - you can read it over a weekend - but it is surprisingly deep and well-researched. The book, written in the straightforward prose one expects from a seasoned newspaper reporter, is especially strong on Graham's bumpy yet successful ride as a politician in Florida. The author's observations of Graham are positive, yet balanced, looking at Graham's strengths and weaknesses, his moments of true leadership and his worst mistakes. On the whole, the book left me with a favorable impression of Graham -- he comes across as a bright, patriotic and hard-working leader who tried to make peoples lives better.

No one, not Fleming, not Clancy, no one does it better than Adam Hall. His entire Quiller series is far and away THE BEST of the genre`.

Search through used bookstores to find his earlier works. They are worth the time and effort.

Quiller, creation of Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor's non de plume) is a secret agent's secret agent. He is offered missions all over the world and he executes them. He shares all his fears and thoughts with us. Hall has a unique way of building suspense with hiss use of sentence structure. Marvelous books of which Quiller Barracuda is a good example.

I am a new resident to Orlando, so I needed something to find my way around the downtown area. This book is great to keep in the car to help with getting around town or finding alternate routes. It is a very detailed map which is great, and it's not confusing! The best part about it is the index where you can look up the street that you are trying to locate and it will tell you exactly which page to go to. Also, it has a list of schools and the area in which they are located, which was great for me since I wanted to know the locations of schools before I moved here. It also has a list of post offices, shopping centers, golf courses, libraries, hospitals, parks etc. which has been so nice to have in the car when I'm trying to find something close by.

I would recommend this street guide to anyone! It is worth the money for sure!!!

I work in a business where I drive all over Orlando, from St Cloud to Sanford, Winter Garden to Melbourne, and usually I know where I am going. However, there are a lot of areas, especially downtown, that can become confusing. This book has helped me everytime I've been turned around or lost. Not only that, but I also have used the book to help others when they are lost. It's a great driving guide, and I recommend that anyone who drives in Orlando (or is planning to drive in Orlando) get it.

A REVIEW OF RIDE THE EAGLE (Rose International) A strike in any business has a tremendous effect on lots of people, moreso when it draggs on into months. When it goes that long, union bosses and management are generally miles apart, and haggling over major issues. Such is the case at the New York Mirror where Lester Gordon, the union negotiator, and Caroline Keller, the Mirror's labor relations representative, have their respective negotiating teams at odds with each other. Kristina O'Donnelly has not only put together an excellent plot, but she has managed to write this book with great passion, preciseness and emotion. She writes so well that you can feel the tension in the conference room where union and management are locked in heated negotiations; brings out the emotional upheavals that go on in such confrontations, the anger, frustration that almost triggers violence between two of the key players, even the tension of crossing a picket line. You can even feel the tautness in Caroline's body as she slips and slides across icy sidewalks on a windy, cold, snowy night, trying to get to Lester's office to deliver a talk from the heart as negotiations are at a crucial juncture. O'Donnelly also develops a very heated, exciting, but controversial romance between Lester and Caroline, and you can feel the underlying concerns of both as they fall more deeply in love, and grow more physically attracted to each other, unaable to quell the fires that burn within. While you wonder what happens to the Mirror's strike, whether or not the shutdown of the newspaper and the intimacy between Lester and Caroline will have a bearing on their futures, she makes you wonder if their relationship will brilliantly flourish, or finally go down in flames. Kristina O'Donnelly makes you feel all the emotions involved, to want to keep reading on, anxious to get to the end for the climax, and once you're there, to keep going on and on. Ride the Eagle is an excellent, highly recommended book, a real five-star effort by Kristina O'Donnelly. Dan Murr Clocktower Books

A REVIEW OF RIDE THE EAGLE (Rose International) A strike in any business has a tremendous effect on lots of people, moreso when it draggs on into months. When it goes that long, union bosses and management are generally miles apart, and haggling over major issues. Such is the case at the New York Mirror where Lester Gordon, the union negotiator, and Caroline Keller, the Mirror's labor relations representative, have their respective negotiating teams at odds with each other. Kristina O'Donnelly has not only put together an excellent plot, but she has managed to write this book with great passion, preciseness and emotion. She writes so well that you can feel the tension in the conference room where union and management are locked in heated negotiations; brings out the emotional upheavals that go on in such confrontations, the anger, frustration that almost triggers violence between two of the key players, even the tension of crossing a picket line. You can even feel the tautness in Caroline's body as she slips and slides across icy sidewalks on a windy, cold, snowy night, trying to get to Lester's office to deliver a talk from the heart as negotiations are at a crucial junction. O'Donnelly also develops a very heated, exciting, but controversial romance between Lester and Caroline, and you can feel the underlying concerns of both as they fall more deeply in love, and grow more physically attracted to each other, unaable to quell the fires that burn within. While you wonder what happens to the Mirror's strike, whether or not the shutdown of the newspaper and the intimacy between Lester and Caroline will have a bearing on their futures, she makes you wonder if their rrelationship will brilliantly flourish, or finally go down in flames. Kristina O'Donnelly makes you feel all the emotions involved, to want to keep reading on, anxious to get to the end for the climax, and once you're there, to keep going on and on. Ride the Eagle is an excellent, highly recommended book, a real five-star effort by Kristina O'Connelly. Dan Murr Clocktower Books

Sailing Away from Winter


After reading the first page of Sailing Away From Winter I immediately realized that I had forgotten what a good writer Silver Donald Cameron is. Unlike many sailing adventure books, Cameron shies away from writing a glorified log book but rather makes the reader feel that he is in the cockpit of "Magnus" and experiences the joys of sailing in a fair wind on a sunny day to the unending frustration of a finicky and somewhat unreliable diesel engine that is maintained by a bilge dwelling scurvy crew of evil Norwegian trolls.

While slipping southwards from his homeport of D'Escousse, Silver Donald makes port in such historic Nova Scotia locales as Canso, Halifax, Lunenburg and Yarmouth and then onward to crossing the Bay of Fundy and entering our "beloved" neighbour, the United States of America. Here we learn that like most Canadians, not many Americans on the New England Coast are fans of President George W. Bush as evidenced by many bumper stickers "Needed: One florist to send two Bushes to Iraq"

One common thread in Cameron's many works is his love affair with Cape Breton. During the entire southward voyage Magnus pursues long time friend and fellow Cape Bretoner's Jim and Carol-Anne Organ, of Port Hawkesbury, aboard Seaduction. In the Abaco's the crews of the two Cape Breton vessels rendezvous and share many colourful yarns after cruising more than 3000 miles away from their beloved island. If there's one thing about Cape Bretoner's as the song goes "One thing I know wherever I go there's always friends from back home".

From a sailor's perspective I found that Sailing Away From Winter can be used as a reference book for those of us planning to navigate the Intracoastal Waterway while keeping company with the family pet, a travel guide of good marinas along the ICW, and maybe most importantly a guide for diesel engine repair. As any seasoned cruiser knows: The sailing is the easy part of the cruise, it's knowing how to fix things that really count. Well done Captain.

"Sailing Away From Winter: A Cruise From Nova Scotia to Florida and Beyond" is the true-life memoir of Canadian columnist Silver Donald Cameron, who dared to make his dreams of a sea voyage come true. With his wife and their beloved dog, he traveled more than three thousand nautical miles in 236 days, visiting towns dotting the coast from Nova Scotia to Florida, crossing the Gulf Stream, experiencing the Bahamas, and much more. A vividly detailed recounting of the joys and perils of navigating the ocean in an aged Norwegian-built ketch, the camaraderie shared with other cruisers, and much more. Highly recommended.

Author Betsy James has managed to capture the true flavor and intrigue of the northern half of Florida, a place not frequented by the Pink Flamingo Set. No "World of Beer", "World of 'Gators", mouse-eared tourists or drunk preppies crowding the beach at springtime break. James describes, instead, a quiet, spanish-moss draped world of small-town life, sparsely populated with colorful characters and full of lore and mystery. Her short little stories, brimming with native charm, fit into today's busy lifestyle. The slim paperback is portable and a reader can finish a story in the span of a coffee break, or a couple of stories while the baby naps.

For travers looking for a different sort of experience, James accurately describes Florida's best-kept secret in her first book. Read "Sandspurs and Sawgrass" and then plan a vacation along the northern gulf coast of Florida to experience it for yourself.

The pristine north Florida landscape jumps off the page at you, as do the characters in this awesome book by Betsy James. The stories are tinged with humor and melancholy, also You'll read about the ghosts of the Drew Mansion and moonshiner Louis Hill, a true-to-life Madison County, Florida legend.Thank you, Betsy James, for introducing the world to north Florida and all our interesting people

This 54-page 5-chapter book tells the story of Joe Browder's successful 1969 effort to defeat the planned construction of a major airport 50 miles from Miami in the Big Cypress Swamp. As head of the Miami chapter of the U.S. National Audubon Society, Browder felt that his only chance to stop the destructive development in the swamp would be to gain support from others. He convinced both old-time alligator hunter Gator Bill and Miccosukee chief Buffalo Tiger to join his fight.

Next Browder drafted Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Douglas had written her legendary book, River of Grass, in 1947. He drove her to the site of the jetport, where some trees had already been cut and the swamp drained. She decided then and there to help. The people of Florida could have a jetport or the Everglades, but they couldn't have both. The former, if constructed, would destroy the latter.

Douglas formed the Friends of the Everglades and took the fight to Washington D.C. and then Interior Secretary Walter Hickel and Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. They ordered an environmental study, which found that the jetport would so pollute the Glades' water, its lifeblood, that all wildlife there would be threatened.

At last, Joe Browder too made it to Washington, where he met with President Richard Nixon. Transportation Secretary Volpe supported the jetport, while Interior Secretary Hickel opposed it. Nixon sent his daughter Julie to Florida to see the Everglades. When she returned to Washington, she told her the President that the Everglades were a national treasure. Nixon called a press conference and opposed the jetport.

This is a great book for children, which shows what can one person can accomplish if only he tries. And of course, it extols the virtues of one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Alyssa A. Lappen

While written as a social studies textbook for young children, Save the Everglades is the most accurate account ever published about the time so many years ago when environmentalists, Native Americans and the people who lived and hunted in the Everglades joined together to protect America's most endangered National Park.

Save the Everglades is part of a series of 28 books edited by the late historian Alex Haley (of Roots fame), written to help children understand how change in America is made by real people. Haley placed this book about a conflict between protecting nature and building an aiport in the same category with the series' book about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott -- books about people working together, making choices about what kind of communities they want to have.

Save the Everglades tells how very different people who all shared a love of nature fought to stop political leaders and real estate developers in Miami, Florida from building what would have been the world's largest airport, just a few miles from Everglades National Park and within the Big Cypress Swamp, the wildest and richest part of the Everglades. Hunters, alligator poachers, Miccosukee Indians, school children and environmental leaders started a national campaign that convinced the President of the United States to withdraw federal money and permits for the airport project, and then to buy the Big Cypress and make it part of the Everglades protected by the National Parks System.

This book is about one of the campaigns that helped bring together the national environmental movement of the 1960s, but the book is also important for people who care about today's environmental issues, because Everglades National Park is, in the year 2000, once more threatened by another airport project sponsored by Miami political leaders and real estate developers. So people in Florida and across America are once more appealing to the President of the United States to Save the Everglades.

To make the publisher's first draft more suitable for children, the author added some false drama (fear of flying) and eliminated some true drama (death plots by real estate promoters, oddly enough referenced inaccurately in a more recent book about Florida, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief). The writer of this review is also the principal subject of Save the Everglades, and so can personally confirm that with those exceptions, the story is accurate.

Shades of Silence is the third book I've read by Gloria Davidson Marlow, and she's getting better and better. The imagery in this book is what really struck me, quite apropos considering the storyline and psychic abilities of the heroine, Sara Jennings. There is no distinction made between the beautifully crafted wordscapes that send the reader to the romantic oceanside setting and the frighteningly vivid images of what Sara sees when she "reads" someone--both make the reader feel as though they're experiencing it along with this compassionate heroine. Paired with the heart-wrenching struggles of the traumatized eight-year-old girl who witnessed her mother's murder and the sexual tension between Sara and the man who hires her to help his daughter, Ms. Marlow's word-painting talent makes her latest thriller an emotional mosaic that satisfies on multiple levels.

Note to author: there's plenty of room on my book shelf for more books by Gloria Davidson Marlow!

Sara Jennings has a gift. Since early childhood she's tapped into the emotions and inner experiences of others. Swirling colors, overpowering feelings, and stark visions often come with a touch of her hand. Sara is exhausted by such daily assaults on her senses and isolates herself in search of peace. When Drake Sexton seeks her out in hopes of helping his young daughter, Sara initially turns him away. Sexton is an angry, shattered man. His daughter Kelsey is trapped in horror after seeing her mother's death. She has not spoken in several years. Despite misgivings, Sara agrees to spend three months in the Sexton home to help Kelsey return to normal life.

Kelsey Sexton is a beautiful child who blossoms towards healing over time with Sara's help. And Drake Sexton cannot hide his need for tenderness and warmth from Sara's gift of seeing true emotions. Drake's dead wife Madeline was a classic beauty, an empty shell of a woman in life and a cold, haunting apparition in death. Her ghostly presence is evident in the house Drake built overlooking the ocean, and along the beach where she died. Sara quickly realizes that Madeline's death came as the result of murder, not suicide as she had been told. As she learns more about the Sextons, an unidentified evil gains power and momentum. And soon, everyone who knows the truth about Madeline's death is eliminated by her killer. Sara is in
danger from the deadly stalker, whose image remains hidden from her. Complicating her situation is the growing love she feels for Drake.

Shades of Silence represents another successful Marlow excursion into passion and suspense. The mystery is chilling as Sara gradually learns the murderer's identity and motives. Sara's gift is harrowing and believably detailed. Drake Sexton is a sympathetic character, struggling to make sense out of a broken life. And Kelsey is a delightful child whose world is
brightened by Sara's warm and compassionate personality. For readers of the mystery and romance genre, any book by Gloria Davidson Marlow should be a must read.

a fine book for anyone looking into a shipwreck in florida or seeking information about shipwrecks ---will laid out and easy to use.

Shipwrecks of Florida : a comprehensive listing is great reading and a fantastic reference book. Anyone interested in underwater archaeology or shipwreck recovery should read this book and keep it as part of their library. I have been involved in the field of shipwreck recovery for eleven years, and I also manage the popular web site TreasureExpeditions.com. I feel that this will help to qualify my review of this book. Let me start by saying that I have had the opportunity to meet and work with Steven Singer. Steve is a person of high integrity and knowledge, all of which are displayed in the writing of this book. He has created an invaluable reference book that not only has probably one of the largest collection of shipwreck locations, but also covers other valuable topics such as; Research, Search and salvage, Wreck identification, Artifact conservation and Rights to wrecks. I have an extensive collection of material on underwater archaeology and shipwreck recovery, yet I have found this book to be invaluable to me. This book stands out as one of the true classics in the field of shipwreck recovery and underwater archaeology. Brad "Goldfinder" Johnson