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

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. By Michael Grunwald. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, c. 2006. Pp. [x], 450. Paper, $15.00, ISBN 0-7432-5107-5; cloth, $27.00, ISBN 0-7432-5105-9; e-book, $9.99, ISBN 1-4165-3727-9.)

A recent trend in historical publishing has seen journalists pretending to be historians and historians pretending to be journalists. Typically, the result of such role reversals is weak research, hasty conclusions, and a blow to the cause of sound, contemplative scholarship. Michael Grunwald's The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (even though the Everglades is technically a marsh) does not suffer from all these flaws but posits an intriguing if not altogether original thesis, although it sometimes suffers from overcooked prose: "America's war on nature has left a tattered battlefield in south Florida" (p. 6).

Grunwald surveys Everglades history in fewer than 370 pages exclusive of his admirable endnotes. His thesis, in part, seems to be that from their first interaction with the swamp to the present, humans never properly understood or appreciated the Everglades until it was almost too late. The book is divided into three large sections. Part 1, "Natural Everglades," explores the unique ecological construction with its unique flora and fauna and recounts the first human impressions and interaction with the area. This section retells the more famous stories of Florida history heard in the state's college classrooms year after year: from Ponce de Leon and Pedro Melendez and the Calusa Indians to Andrew Jackson, Osceola, and the futile effort to subdue the Seminoles.

Part 2, "Draining the Everglades," continues the historical survey with Henry Flagler, swamp drainage, and the rise of an early environmental consciousness personified in John James Audubon. In this era, Florida governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, fittingly named president of the National Drainage Congress in 1908, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finally subdued the swamp after a 1928 hurricane hit Palm Beach and moved inland, killing some twenty-five hundred people and causing public outcry for the government to control nature. The response was emotional and, in the end, irresponsible. This was the message of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who became the most vocal proponent of preservation and authored the first, and perhaps only, work anyone should need to read on the subject, The Everglades: River of Grass (New York, 1947). Douglas, along with ecologist Art Marshall--who is rightly credited with being the intellectual father of Everglades restoration--led the crusade to preserve the natural wonder.

Part 3 brings the reader to recent efforts to preserve the swamp and the realization by a growing number of people, thanks to a growing "green" movement, not only that to preserve the Everglades is to preserve south Florida's fresh water supply but also that doing so is in the nation's best interest as an expression of environmental stewardship. Environmental organizations and individuals, such as Florida governor Reubin Askew, who made restoration a central focus, succeeded in bringing national attention to the plight of the Everglades. This restoration movement brought together politicians from both parties in concentrated, if sometimes incomplete and flawed, efforts to preserve the swamp.

The Swamp ultimately offers those unfamiliar with the history of the Everglades a primer on the life of one of America's greatest environmental treasures. One might compare this volume to an introductory survey course in American history designed to provide the uninitiated with a foundation for deeper study. It should be the beginning of one's study of the Everglades but most certainly not the end.

GORDON E. HARVEY

University of Louisiana at Monroe