"Some say that Floridians lack a sense of place—they won’t after reading Al Burt."—Ann Henderson, executive director, Florida Humanities Council "Florida starts in the subtropics and slowly rises into the true temperate zone, the geography and all living things taking on different looks as the elevation goes from sea level to hilly, from the central ridge to the beaches, the terrain from desert-like to swampy, the soil from sugar sands and rich muck to red clay. The blossoms change from orchids and frangipani to azaleas and dogwoods, the people from international sophistication to Cracker commonality, the accents from the bobtailed syllables of New York and distinctive fastbreaking Spanish of the Cubans to the mysteries of Haitian Creole and Southern mushmouth (like mine). . . . One winter season, the story goes, an amused snowbird encountered an old Cracker in crowded South Florida. ‘Lots of weird people down here,’ the snowbird said, patronizingly. ‘Yeah,’ the Cracker replied, looking him over carefully. ‘But they ain't near so many in August as they is this time of year.’"
As a roving reporter for the Miami Herald from 1973 to 1995, Al Burt traveled all of Florida, studying it with the insight of a native and the detached eye of the foreign correspondent he had been. During those years, he observed connections with the state’s past and speculated about its future, and, while he was at it, took note of the human frailties and heroisms he witnessed every day. Al Burt's Florida is like a family portrait, a loving but not uncritical view of a complex and fascinating state. Burt's portrait combines vignettes of notable Floridians--some famous, like Ed Ball, but most better known locally--with those of the state’s many special places: Okeechobee in the teens and twenties, Miami Beach in the fifties (when dinner in Havana was only a $26 plane ride away), Wakulla Springs when it served as Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan movie set, modern-day Tallahassee with its formality and grace. Al Burt himself emerges from this landscape as the remarkable, engaging, and passionate Floridian he is. He takes us in hand, starting from his headquarters in the north Florida scrub, on a tour of the charm, substance, and fantasy that are Florida, yesterday and today. And always, he dwells with greatest affection on the smaller places, the real places, the anchors of old Florida--and on those folks who do their best to preserve them. In the process he captures what few have expressed--a sense of Florida as home.
Al Burt worked as a journalist for 45 years, the last 22 of which he spent as a roving Florida columnist for the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he has been a freelance contributor to many magazines, including The Nation and Historic Preservation, and is the author of several books, among them Florida: A Place in the Sun (1974) and Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984). In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism.

Al Burt's Florida: Snowbirds, Sand Castles, and Self-Rising Crackers (Florida History and Culture)

Burt Jr., Al

Travel

University Press of Florida

"The Tropic of Cracker will . . . end the debate once and for all, of whether the term ‘Cracker’ is derogatory or a source of great pride. Al Burt has a masterpiece here."--Sandra Bogan, Florida Audubon Society
 From the preface: "The Tropic of Cracker survives in myth, memory, and love of natural Florida. It exists more in the mind than in geography, more in the memory than in the sight, more in attitude than in the encounter. . . . This book tells you about one man’s vision of a state struggling to remain true to itself. It mixes new essays with a span of earlier ones written during nearly a quarter century of roving the state as a columnist for the Miami Herald. All of them, in sum, help illuminate and explain the Tropic of Cracker."--Al Burt
 The crack of the old-time cow hunter’s whip gave the native Floridian a nickname, but Al Burt’s Tropic of Cracker is a state of mind shared by those who love "what remains of the Florida that needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its creation, that was here before there was a can opener or a commercial or a real-estate agent." In his years of roving the state as a Miami Herald columnist, Al Burt mapped Florida’s Tropic of Cracker, not with lines of latitude and longitude but with stories. The Crackers Burt tells of are men and women from Apalachicola to the Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys. They lived in the late 1800s, and they live today--along the Ocklawaha and in the floodplains of Lake Okeechobee. They were cow hunters, Conchs, and alligator men. They grew oranges, sugarcane, and muscadine grapes. They made moonshine. They drove mules, ate fried mullet, and told yarns in a Cracker creole about Florida’s panthers, snakes, alligators, and hurricanes. There are luminaries among them--Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Virgil Hawkins, John DeGrove, Harry Crews--but mostly they are just regular folk who mark the borders of the elusive and magical Tropic of Cracker. For anyone who loves the old Florida and still has hope for the new one, Tropic of Cracker is the state’s truest road map and Al Burt its most eloquent cartographer.
Al Burt worked as a journalist for 45 years, the last 22 at the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he has been a freelance contributor to many magazines, including The Nation and Historic Preservation, and is the author of several books, among them Florida: A Place in the Sun (1974), Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984), and Al Burt’s Florida (UPF, 1997), which was awarded the 1998 Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Book Award. In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism.

The Tropic of Cracker (Florida History and Culture)

History

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Books by Burt Jr., Al

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Burt Jr., Al. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Al Burt's Florida: Snowbirds, Sand Castles, and Self-Rising Crackers (Florida History and Culture)

The Tropic of Cracker (Florida History and Culture)