Florida Books

this book tells me all about the area of sunny Isles,its hotels land mass,and a little about the future of it.

This powerful narrative, written by a direct descendant of the princess Yani, draws on stories of incidents taken from the author's family history that were passed from generation to generation until set down here.

For a time, Yani is happy as a slave on Denfield's South Carolina plantation. She becomes the favorite of black and white alike. Denfield's sons instruct her in grammar and deportment. At a festive plantation "slave wedding," she is mated with the giant slave Koba amid much feasting and merriment.

Deep sorrow comes when Yani's slave husband and their daughter, Yola, are sold to other masters. Years pass, and Yani learns nothing of her child's fate. She does not even know that she has a grandchild. Yet why is she so strangely attracted to the slave girl Lucinda, whom she meets in Charleston?

Yani seeks consolation in the music she plays on her African harp, and in her prophetic visions, which reveal that her people will be freed from bondage and find the peace she so deeply desires. Her story, "From the Slave Cabin of Yani," is a moving account of slavery and a woman's hopes for her children and her people.

South florida as a whole has a relitive short history and it is all presented in a fantastic format. AS must read for south floridians

This is a VERY helpful travel book! In 357 pages it gives you access to the Online Travel Directory and has a large pull-out color map, yet it is small enough to fit in almost any handbag. Sites of interest covered in the book include Animal Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios, Water Parks, Golf, Tennis, Islands of Adventure, Daytona Beach, Kennedy Space Center and More! It gives pretty accurate ratings of rides, restaurants, hotels and such. This is especially helpful if you are taking the kids, you can use this to plan out the vacation, know what rides and food your kids will enjoy and even gives sample itineraries. The information is reliable and the details are wonderful! If you, or someone you know, are planning a trip to the Orlando area, this is a MUST!

The definitive guide to Miami & the Keys. As a former Miami resident, I read the guide on a recent return visit, and almost wanted to stay. If I could this book six stars I would. I advise all would-be travellers to Miami & the Keys to invest in this indispensable guide.

Of several Orlando/Disney World books I have read, this is probably the best for several reasons.

Probably the best feature of this book is that each attraction has a letter grade rating and a recommended age. This was very helpful in planning our trip and eliminating boring attractions and those intended for a different age group.

This book had current information on the new Universal Studios Escape Park, but did not have much info on Asia in the Animal Kingdom (other books did.)

Overall, this was the most useful book in planing our Orlando vacation.

I know some people criticize Frommer's for being "negative," but to me, they're just doing their job--alerting you about the good and bad of travel destinations, and EVERY one of them has some bad. I don't think it's "negative" to mention that if you visit certain areas of a particular city after dark you should use the lighted, public parking lots instead of parking on the streets because of problems with break-ins and muggings. That's simply fulfilling their responsibility to their readers.

At any rate, I bought this guide in preparation for a trip to Tampa. I had no idea how much there was to do in that part of Florida until I started looking through this guide. It steered us to the Big Cat Rescue facility (NOT to be missed if you love wild cats), the free manatee viewing by the TECO plant and the car museum in Sarasota to name a few. Also got some great restaurant ideas and general information about the area.

This book gave me a good break down of the area we are going to.

Hi folks!
Once again Frommer's was a life-saver for me and my family. This is the third trip (two to Europe) that we take using all the information provided in Frommer's travel guides.

All the tips and information were most reliable and we were able to do much before having planned our outings according to the book.
I strongly recommend it!

Raw Deal

Once in a while you read a book chock full of information you didn't know that you didn't know, or more importantly that you didn't know you needed to know. "The Fruits of Their Labor," by Cindy Hahamovitch, is such a book. The subtitle - Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 - only hints at the breadth of the subject matter, which stretches to include an economic and social history of agriculture in states from Maine to Florida and the Deep South. Though the author traces the changes in farming and truck-gardening that resulted from the partial mechanization of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the focus of the book is on the conversion of traditional year-round farm-hands into seasonal laborers, and thus to the lowest-on-the-totem-pole migrants whose welfare was of minimal interest to ever-larger farm businessmen. More than half of the book deals with the twelve years of the New Deal and the Second World War, revealing how ineffective the "reformers" were in the face of opposition from racists and conservatives of both parties. It's no surprise to learn that FDR threw farm labor to the wolves, excluding it from the benefits of collective bargaining. Likewise, it's hardly shocking to realize how little understanding of rural realities the urban reformers of the era were, in their hopes that paternalism and a little health education would restore the agrarian paradise envisioned by Tom Jefferson. The value of this book comes from observing the mechanisms of interest groups - owners, to be blunt - in turning the efforts of government at all levels to the service of their selfish interests. It's also quite astonishing to observe how capitalistic farm-owners and government at all levels colluded, first in the callous exploitation of recent immigrants from Italy and then in the cultivation of the harvest of easily manipulated "undocumented" workers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia, which the same people are still hypocritically ranting against. And finally, at the broadest level, this text is a study of the malfunctional interaction of federal and state governments at cross purposes, with the worst outcomes invariably befalling the humblest citizens.

I know something about the history of agriculture in the Far West, from the days of the Southern Pacific "Octopus" to the heroic struggles of Cesar Chavez and the UFW. I know it academically, but also personally. During my high school summers in California in the late 1950s, I was a "fruit picker" - trailer court white trash - with most of my earnings going to feed my family while my father blew his paychecks on another recent-model car. I picked string beans, hops, tomatoes, and prunes. It was filthy, fatiguing, and unhealthy work, and a source of shame when my classmates heard of it. The idea that bringing in the harvest is healthful and noble was and is cow flop; breathing dust and pesticides in the hot sun for ten or twelve hours a day is not a pleasant interlude. I finally looked old enough to get a job picking apples from a ladder, the cleanest and most profitable sort of field work, if not the safest. At age eighteen, I was legally old enough to work in the cannery. It was still back-breaking; as the freshest face, my task was to lift boxes of apple sauce from a conveyor belt to a palette, and I estimate that I handled as much as thirty thousand pounds of apple sauce a night. But it was a union cannery! For work that was if anything less skilled than picking, I got paid an hourly wage that was eight times higher than I ever earned on the ladder. It was the Teamsters' Union, by the way. I kept my membership all through my four years at Harvard College, where two of my classmates were Richard Darman, Bush I's budget director, and Boyden Gray, the Bush Family legal counsel.

The history of farm labor and thwarted unionization east of the Mississippi is, if anything, even more dastardly than that of the West Coast. It's not a story that makes for pleasant reading, though Ms. Hahamovitch writes clearly and unpretentiously. Perhaps the best way to capture your interest will be to offer a few snippets.

Page 165 - Discussing the market-place economics of farmer labor, she writes: If labor prices are taken as a measure of farm labor supply , then it is difficult to explain why truck farmers complained of labor shortages when they were apparently well supplied with labor. [This was in the years just before WW2.] However, the notion of a "labor market" that operates according to rules of supply and demand ignores the impact of custom and culture, of deeply held assumptions about what labor is "worth." [The assumptions she refers to are the racial and class prejudices which have shadowed every aspect of labor history in the Land of Equality.]
Page 178 - Discussing the WW2 importation of workers from the Caribbean and Mexico, managed by the federal government, she writes: The WFA was reluctant to include Puerto Ricans in the program because, as U.S, citizens, they could not be "repatriated" at the end of a contracted period. The solution...was to withhold a portion of each worker's pay and deposit in a Puerto Rican bank. The workers.... could not withdraw these funds until they returned home....
On the next page, she describes the use of POWs to oversupply the labor pool in order to keep workers from successfully demanding higher piece rates: POWs represented a particular challenge to federal authorities, because although enlisted men could be forced to work...they could hardly be fired or deported. They were in some ways in a position analogous to that of slaves, but unlike slaves they could neither be whipped nor sold.

Pow! Did you know that the USA used forced labor during WW2? Actually, that's not nearly as shocking as the laws passed in several Southern states that required men to work in the fields or be immediately drafted, and women to work in agriculture or be jailed. Black men and women, of course. There were also laws during both World Wars that required agricultural workers to remain in specific counties, and those laws were enforced by local authorities even when various federal agencies tried to recruit workers to save crops in truly labor-short areas.

To recount all of Ms. Hahamovitch's amazing revelations, I'd need to quote the whole book. One further thought: States' Rights was born as a tactic to defend slavery, and States' Rights has remained inextricable from racism ever since. If that thesis seems unpalatable to you, then you are one of those who don't yet know what you don't know, and you'd better start informing yourself by reading "The Fruits of Their Labor" before you denounce me as a spawn of liberalism.