America250: Histories, Memoirs, and Travelogues - Florida and Georgia

 

  One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness.  From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries.  That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues.  It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes.  This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre.  In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind.  Some  are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking.  A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.

    Here's a selection of a few books from and about the states that I've lived in, Georgia and Florida.

Taylor Brown is a very popular current southern novelist.  My favorite Brown novel is The River of Kings.  The River of Kings by Taylor Brown is a novel that interweaves three timelines: two brothers kayaking down Georgia's Altamaha River to scatter their father's ashes, their father's life as a shrimper and drug smuggler, and the story of a 1564 French expedition to the same river, led by artist Jacques Le Moyne (discussed in previous travelogue post, pre-1800).  Having grown up near and fished on the Altamaha, Georgia's greatest river, this book really resonated with me.  The Altamaha was once a major transportation route through Georgia.  Barges carried goods, and lumbermen floated logs down the river to the Atlantic all the way into the 1930s. An attorney in Lyons, Georgia (the county seat of my home county) named T. Ross Sharpe also wrote a column for the local newspaper in the 1950s and 1960s in which he recorded stories of life along the Altamaha going back to the early 1900s.  The stories were collected into a volume, which I was lucky to find a copy of, and, since 2005, the community has put on an annual folk play dramatizing a selection of stories.  A few years ago, one of my cousins published a guide to Georgia's 159 counties called Georgia Patchwork.  She traveled to each county, took photos, and collected stories about each one.  There's a little less travel involved in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is centered in 1980s Savannah, Georgia.  Ostensibly, a true crime story, Berendt actually an exploration of the city and a number of eccentric real-life actors.  A lot of Savannahians enjoyed a long 15 minutes of fame as a result, and 32 years after the book's publication, Savannah still makes lots of money from tourism generated by the book and subsequent movie.  Few authors have built as huge a career off of one book as Berendt has.  

Shortly after moving to Florida, I was fortunate to meet prolific writer Craig Pittman and to discover his books.  Pittman is a very talented journalist known for exposing state and local corruption, especially related to environmental issues, and for highlighting the people who are real Florida characters and who do or have done their part to make Florida the unique place that it is.

Joshua Ginsberg is another acquaintance I've made since moving to Florida.  He's published guidebooks to the weird, wacky, and wonderful things  in Tampa Bay and Orlando.  Whether you're a long-timer, a new resident, a snowbird, or a tourist, you can use his books to make your own adventures.

  

Finding Florida  is a general history of the state.  At the Dawn of Tourism tells the story of the men and women who were among the first tourists in Florida and who inspired the tourists who followed.  Art Levy's book is another great collection of stories about people from various walks of life who have contributed to Florida's Florida-ness.  Cathy Salustri's book book is more of a true travelogue.  Salustri made a 5,000 mile road trip through the backroads and small towns of Florida, inspired by the 1930s guidebook published by the New Deal agency, the Federal Writers' Project, visiting the locations and driving the roads described.  Rick Kilby has written a couple of books about Florida's famous springs and waterways, attractions that have inspired travel for hundreds of years.