A fascinating glimpse into the past, Gail Briggs Nolen’s Memories of Merritt Island records the history of Merritt Island, Florida when two families homesteaded on land which is now part of the Kennedy Space Center. The collection of family memories transports readers back to a time before the rockets came, offering a charming excursion both in pictures and in words into the lives of two families of pioneers: the Briggs and Benecke families.
A Land Remembered has become Florida's favorite novel. Now this Student Edition in two volumes makes this rich, rugged story of the American pioneer spirit more accessible to young readers. Patrick Smith tells of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family battling the hardships of the frontier. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias and Emma MacIvey arrive in the Florida wilderness with their son, Zech, to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that his wealth has not been worth the cost to the land. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history with a cast of memorable characters who battle wild animals, rustlers, Confederate deserters, mosquitoes, starvation, hurricanes, and freezes to carve a kingdom out of the Florida swamp. In this volume, meet young Zech MacIvey, who learns to ride like the wind through the Florida scrub on Ishmael, his marshtackie horse, his dogs, Nip and Tuck, at this side. His parents, Tobias and Emma, scratch a living from the land, gathering wild cows from the swamp and herding them across the state to market. Zech learns the ways of the land from the Seminoles, with whom his life becomes entwined as he grows into manhood. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and Literary Hub This lucent anti-memoir from celebrated novelist Lydia Millet explores the pain and joy of being a parent, child, and human at a moment when the richness of the planet’s life is deeply threatened. Across more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction, readers have become intimate with Lydia Millet’s distinctive voice and sly wit. We Loved It All, her first nonfiction book, combines the precision of fact with the power of narrative to evoke our enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved it All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”— the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future. Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. In a thrilling distillation of experience and emotion, she evinces the familiar sense of feeling both well-meaning and powerless—a creature subject to forces that are baffling in their immensity. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance. We Loved It All shimmers with curiosity and laconic humor yet addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. An incantatory, bewitching devotional to the vast and precious bestiary of the earth, it asks that we extend to other living beings the protection they deserve—the simple grace of continued existence.
Cocoa is the gateway to America's Spaceport. But before it became the tourist haven it is today, it was a small village settled by fishermen and their families. The city's location on the Indian River Lagoon made it central to early steamboat passage and breathed life into fishing and commerce. After World War II, the space age brought science and engineering to nearby Cape Canaveral. The city also has a history of baseball nearly as long as the sport itself. It was home to the Cocoa Fliers of the 1940s and hosted the Houston Colt 45s during spring training for twenty years. Join author Bob Harvey as he recounts the sunny history of one of the Space Coast's oldest cities.
The Hard Bargain describes in vivid detail and elegant prose the clash of wills between a famous father and his hard-driving middle son. Richard Tucker, the American superstar tenor from the golden age of the Metropolitan Opera, demanded that his son become a surgeon. Rejecting his father’s wishes, David wanted to follow his father onto the opera stage. Their struggle over David’s future—by turns hilarious and humiliating, wise and loving—is played out in medical and musical venues around the world. The father and son strike a bargain, the hard bargain of the title, which permitted both dreams to flicker for a decade until one (the right one, it turns out) bursts into sustaining flame. This heartfelt memoir about a son’s struggle against the looming power of a magnetic father is conveyed in a moving narrative that one reviewer has called “the most dramatic exploration of the private life of a legendary singer in the annals of opera literature.”
The history of Central Brevard County is almost as long and complicated as the geographical borders of the county itself. Stretching north and south for 77 miles, Brevard County is a thin strip of land, barely 20 miles across at its widest point. Within these narrow confines, however, diverse and dynamic communities have left their marks and many continue to flourish, among them Merritt Island and Cocoa Beach. Only 32 miles in length, Merritt Island was once a scrub-covered parcel of land settled by hardy pioneers who raised cattle and cultivated citrus, vegetable, and pineapple crops. Though now a commercial and residential center, the careful observer can still find, tucked away in hammocks along the shore and surrounded by million-dollar homes, the old citrus groves, simple homes built by early settlers, and the remnants of small communities that were once hubs of activity. Cocoa Beach owes much of its story to the vision and energy of a single man, Gus Edwards, who promoted the area as a resort to rival the communities of Miami Beach and Venice. With the coming of the space program to Florida's Atlantic coast in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the area built upon elaborately drawn subdivision plats and a few scattered buildings to become the bustling modern city it is today.
