Considered by many as the country’s most dynamic, fastest growing and sexiest city, Miami is more popular than ever before. Yet, it is a city that doesn’t merely change but evolves, never rewriting the past, just adding to its illustrious heritage. And this is the real beauty of Miami. The chic Surf Club and the vibrant Faena Hotel did not replace the emblematic Raleigh of the 1940s nor the Ritz Carlton of the 50s, rather they complement them. Classics like Joe’s Stone Crab continue to serve their signature fare to sell-out crowds each night, as new establishments attract with name chefs. The iconic art deco architecture remains on full display as the modern Herzog & de Meuron-designed Perez Art Museum stands in stark contrast. Replete with arts and culture year round from the international art at The Bass to the street art of Wynwood Walls, each December, the city is taken over by the global cultural elite for Art Basel Miami Beach, a fair that attracts over 80,000 visitors who turn out for the momentous art, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s show stopping “Comedian”, and the exuberant festivities hosted each evening.
South Beach in the late 1990s is a town of blink-and-you'll-miss-'em nightclubs populated by celebrities, models, mobsters, heiresses, drug dealers, drag queens, and fun seekers of all stripes. It's a place where the famous come to party like locals, the locals party like rock stars behind velvet ropes, and the press is savvy enough to know what not to report. Rachel Baum is a sheltered, career-oriented everygirl when she moves to South Beach from her quiet Miami suburb, searching for a life less ordinary. Quickly making friends among SoBe's most exclusive scenesters, she spends her days building a career and her nights building a reputation. But in a town where friends become enemies faster than highs become hangovers, the life less ordinary turns into more than Rachel bargained for. As she pursues the endless party in penthouses, dive bars, after-hours clubs, and cocaine speakeasies, Rachel struggles to balance her goals and ambitions with the decadence and excess -- especially her drug-fueled, on-again off-again relationship with Yale-graduate-turned-addict John Hood -- that threaten to destroy everything she's always worked for. With tremendous wit and razor-sharp insight, Diary of a South Beach Party Girl portrays the innermost sanctums of South Beach's privileged Beautiful People through the eyes of a no longer innocent heroine.
HOT SAND. HOT CLUBS. HOT GUYS.What more could two girls want? Try the same guy.SPRING BREAK. SOUTH BEACH. 'NUFF SAID.On a trip to a place where anything can happen -- and does -- two ex-best friends discover that a chance encounter can lead to the chance of a lifetime.HOLLY: Dream date or bad fate? She wants true love--and a break from her strict parents. Perhaps a spring fling will do? ALEXA: Flirting with destiny or flirting with disaster? The guy of her dreams turns out to be her friend's first love. How far is she willing to go? This year, Spring Break is going to be scandalous!
Left suddenly penniless and alone, twenty-nine-year-old trust fund child Gabriel Tucker discovers his only asset is an old Miami Beach apartment building named the Venus De Milo Arms and heads for Florida to rebuild his life, only to become caught up in the outrageous and decadent world of South Beach, surrounded by a colorful assortment of offbeat characters. Original.
South Beach Star is a modern day Valley of the Dolls set in South Beach. Life is sweet for Jamie Kidd, a thirty-something writer, till he wakes up one morning to discover that his lover has left town after cleaning out the bank account and leaving Jamie heartbroken, penniless, and somewhat suicidal. Jamie makes the entirely sensible, or so he believes, decision to escape to South Beach where he finds success and quasi-celebrity as a nightlife columnist for the SOUTH BEACH STAR, a weekly tabloid that covers the trendy South Beach scene and the celebrities that populate it. South Beach opens its arms to Jamie, who, like an actor taking on a new role, throws himself into his fabulous new lifestyle covering the notorious celebrity-studded party scene where nightly he mingles with beautiful shallow fashionistas, famous models, and wealthy jet-setters. His coveted lifestyle masks an out-of-control roller-coaster ride of late-night parties and photo-ops, fueled by a gradual addiction to crystal meth. Like many before him, Jamie loses control and falls victim to his fast lifestyle.
Is Enrique trying to win her over -- or just trying to win? Road trip! Lula Cruz has her last summer before college all mapped out. She's checking out of NYC and checking in to the sizzling hot "SoBe" scene with her best friend, Jeff. When their day jobs get to be a drag, they spice things up by entering a local band contest. And spicy it is! Turns out that the hottie Lula keeps running into is also her band's toughest competition! Enrique might seem like the perfect guy, but as things heat up Lula has to wonder: Can she trust her biggest rival with her heart?
A companion to "The South Beach Diet" presents more than two hundred recipes that demonstrate how to eat healthfully without compromising taste, outlining the diet's basic philosophies and sharing personal success stories.
Each Christmas between 1988 and 1995, Barry Lewis travelled to South Beach, Miami, to trade the harsh London winter for a tropical paradise. There he photographed the diverse (and eccentric) people who made up the community: fashionistas, newly-arrived Cubans (following the Meriel exodus in 1980), Jewish retirees from New York, drag queens and the gay population who flocked to Ocean Drive for the party scene. Lewis' images are accompanied by quotes from the subjects.
Just in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of Miami Beach, It Happened in Miami, the Magic City: An Oral History features nearly seventy fabulous voices including more than fifteen mini-memorists, telling stories, offering perceptions on subject matter as far back as memory allows up to the exciting headlines of today. Sun and fun, yes, but the story is much more than that. We are there through the dramatic days of World War II, the segregated south that Miami was, Meyer Lansky and cops and robbers, the Cocaine Cowboys, the post–war glamour of the flashy hotels and famed architect Morris Lapidius, the Fountainbleau and Eden Roc, the Jewish presence and contributions, the swinging Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. We are witness to Muhammad Ali and the iconic Fifth Street Gym, the preserving of art deco, the days of the Mariel and Pedro Pan and the Cuban impact. We are brought inside modern day Miami—an international city, a place of culture and dreamers, a city of tomorrow.
From the acclaimed bestselling author of Philistines at the Hedgerow comes a remarkably revealing profile of the Miami Beach no one knows–a tale of fabulous excess, thwarted power, and rekindled lives that will take its place among the decade’s best works of social portraiture. Created from a mix of swampland and dredged-up barrier reef, Miami Beach has always been one part drifter-mecca and one part fantasyland, simultaneously a catch basin for con men, fast-talk artists, and shameless self-promoters, and a Shangri-La for sun worshippers and hardcore hedonists. In Miami Beach it’s often said that "if you’re not indicted you’re not invited." But the city’s mad, fascinating complexity resists easy stereotyping. Fool’s Paradise is more than just a present-day profile of a dark Eden. Gaines journeys back into the city’s social and cultural history, unearthing stories of the resort’s past that are every bit as absorbing–and jaw-dropping–as those of its present. The book begins with a snapshot of the city’s current excess (this is, after all, a sun-washed hamlet that boasts, on a per capita basis, more bars–and breast implants–than any other place in America), then plunges into the Beach’s origins, chronicling the audacious rise of such hoteliers as the Fontainebleau’s Ben Novack and the Eden Roc’s Harry Mufson, the sharp-elbowed tactics of Al Capone and Frank Sinatra, and the Mac-10 shooting sprees of the Marielito and Colombian drug lords. From there, the narrative shifts to two wildly eccentric souls who gave their lives to preserving the city’s architectural dazzle and creating its color palette, introduces us to "the Most Powerful Man in Miami Beach," and arrives finally in the modern day, where we meet, among others, a kinky German playboy who once owned a quarter of South Beach and publicly flaunts his sexual escapades; a fabulously successful nightclub promoter whose addictive past seems to have given him a portal into the night world’s id; and a gaggle of young sexy models, dreamers, and schemers on a mission to achieve significance. Evoking the Beach’s surreal blend of flashy Vegas and old Hollywood glamour, as well as its manic desperation and reckless wealth, Gaines persuasively demonstrates that though the Beach is–in the words of its most famous drag queen–"an island of broken toys . . . a place where people get away with things they’d never get away with anyplace else," it casts an irresistible spell.
