Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape - New SIGNED 1st Edition/1st Printing

Belleville, Bill

ISBN 10: 0813029287 / ISBN 13: 9780813029283

Published by Univ Press of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A., 2006

About this Item

Flawless new 1st Edition/1st Printing hardcover in flawless new dust jacket *SIGNED* by the author on the title page without inscription. "Losing it All to Sprawl is about one man's small piece of a vanishing paradise, yet it's really about all of us who cherish Florida and fear for its future. Bill Belleville writes gorgeously and straight from the heart. This is a compelling and insightful book, and it's impossible to read it without feeling sadness, outrage and awe." - Carl Hiassen, author of Hoot, Skinny Dip, and Tourist Season. Will be bubble-wrapped to protect the corners and shipped in a sturdy box to ensure safe delivery.

Seller Inventory # ABH44

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape - New SIGNED 1st Edition/1st Printing
• Publisher: Univ Press of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813029287
• ISBN 13: 9780813029283
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

One of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2006

Florida Book Award, Florida Nonfiction, Bronze Medalist

Al Burt Award for Florida Journalism

Losing It All to Sprawl is the poignant chronicle of award-winning nature writer Bill Belleville and how he came to understand and love his historic farmhouse and neighborhood, even as it was all wiped out from under him.

As tractors and backhoes encircle Belleville and his community, displacing everything Belleville has called home for the past fifteen years, he tells a story that is much older—10,000 years older. The saga stretches back to the Timucua and the Mayaca living in harmony with Florida’s environment; conquistadors in the “land of flowers”; turn-of-the-century tourists “modernizing” the state; the original Cracker families who lived in Belleville’s farmhouse. The millennia-long transformation is starkly contrasted by the unbridled growth and development consuming Belleville’s home and, ultimately, his very sense of place.

In Losing It All to Sprawl, Belleville accounts for the impacts—social, political, natural, personal—that a community in the crosshairs of unsustainable growth must ultimately bear, but he also offers Floridians, and anyone facing the blight of urban confusion, the hope that can be found in the rediscovery and appreciation of our natural landscapes.

About the Author

Bill Belleville (1945–2020) was a documentary filmmaker and the author of several books, including Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams; The Peace of Blue: Water Journeys; and River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida’s St. Johns River.