Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden: Lives Seen Through the Prism of Family and Place - Hardcover

Doner, Michele Oka; Wolfson, Mitchell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 389985330X ISBN 13: 9783899853308

Publisher: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc., 2005

Synopsis

Miami Beach, Blueprint of an Eden is the story of an extraordinary time and place. It is the concurrent stories of two families placed by destiny in a position to tell them well: the Wolfsons and the Okas. The authors fathers were each mayors of Miami Beach, one in the 40s and one in the 50s and early 60s. Their mothers were prominent first ladies. Their exhaustive family archives provide a rich cultural, architectural, political, social, botanical, stylistic, gastronomic, geological and poetic history of an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. The soul of the book is a dia logue between the authors via letters and narrati ve text. The heart of the book is its sumptuous photographs, architectural blueprints, memorabilia, sheet music (that can be played on a piano), native poetry, maps, drawings, and recipes - everything that gave rise to the contemporary phenomena that is Miami Beach.

About this title

From the Publisher:

No other book on Miami Beach brings together Mickey Mouse, Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the composer Manna Zucca, the horticulturalist Tashiro family, opera singer Renata Tebaldi; the singing cowboy Gene Autry, master photographer Arnold Newman, Joan Fields and her Stradivarius, Oscar winner Geraldine Page, producer Robert Evans, architect Morris Lapidus, Jacqueline Kennedy, Anita Eckberg, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, concert pianist Gina Bachauer, Maestro Leonard Bernstein, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Zorita the snake charmer, John Wayne, Washington politicos, haute couture fashion runways, and pre-Vegas nightlife...in a memoir that is so visual, conversational, poetic and filled with family history, that its local intensity illuminates a national character.

From the Author:

Preface Miami Beach: The Past and Future Perfect

Miami Beach, Blueprint of an Eden is the story of an extraordinary time and place. It is the concurrent stories of two families placed by destiny in a position to tell them well: the Wolfsons, and the Okas. Miami Beach has long been public property, well advertised and of easy access. This book takes it into the realm of private property, thereby giving it a private reading, an intimate touch, by which Miami Beach’s strengths and absurdities are equally open to view. Through letters, a personal narrative is established that reveals Miami Beach as living experience.

The authors maintain the objectivity of anthropologists, who honor their material even as they dissect them and place it on the historical record. The book illuminates actual documents - maps, blueprints, schematics, recipes, sheet music, photographs- setting only one limitation: the use of intimate family archives. Most of the people, sights, events and structures articulated in these pages were part of the fabric of our families.

But unlike anthropologists, the authors are inseparable from what is presented. With respect and a great sense of celebration, we share our insights as to what it was like to grow up in an atmosphere that time would render mythical.

-- Michele Oka Doner and Mitchell Wolfson Jr., August 2005

About this edition

• Publisher: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc.
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 389985330X
• ISBN 13: 9783899853308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328