The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished.

Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.

Michael Grunwald is a reporter at The Washington Post. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, and many other awards. He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez.

Visit his website at www.michaelgrunwald.com.

What Customers Say About The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise:

A must read especially if you live in Florida. A long but an easy and enjoyable read.

Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that did the most to wreck the River of Grass and that is now in charge of fixing it. The heart of the Everglades is technically a marsh.

A few days of struggling through the thigh-deep muck and razor-sharp saw grass convinced them that this was no place for a survey crew, much less a railroad."The bog is fearful," the expedition's log noted. In 1892, a team of surveyors set out across the Everglades to see if a railroad line could be built from Fort Myers to Miami.

Don't take his title literally, though. Later one crewman recalled, "I thought that we were great idiots to come into such a place when we had no wings with which to fly out."These days, the "fearful bog" is only half as big as it used to be.

Yet the River of Grass still retains the power to make everyone who tries to master it look like a king-size idiot.For proof, dig into The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, an entertaining blend of history and politics by award-winning Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald. Grunwald's topic is not so much the biology of the Glades as the fact that every attempt to alter it inevitably becomes mired in a swamp of unintended consequences.Grunwald won several national awards for his 2000 series on the U.S.

For more on the Corps and how it's allowing the destruction of Florida's swamps and marshes, you might like to follow up "The Swamp" with Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss (Florida History and Culture)

Great bit of history. Outstanding research, well written, with a touch of humor and brilliantly organized easy to read and comprehend. Too bad we have not learned anything in the last two hundred years.

"The Swamp" is a well written history of the everglades. I hunted and fished the everglades for fifty years and was personally aware of the problems and controversies surrounding its slow destruction. Michael Grunwald takes the reader through this complex process with a history book that reads with the ease of a suspense novel.N Kellar

From a historical perspective, this is an excellent read on the history of south Florida and the Everglades. It has a bit of a leftist slant in my opinion(written by a rather liberal journalist) although this non-liberal enjoyed the read for its historical value nonetheless. If you want to know the history of south Florida with a page-turner style of writing, I highly recommend this book no matter what your political slant is.