It is difficult to go wrong when writing of questionable behavior and wretched excess in Florida, a fact that is borne out yet again in Christopher Knowlton’s colorful Bubble in the Sun, a wide-ranging treatment of the ill-fated South Florida land boom of the 1920s ... the truly complex roles here are Douglas, Merrick and Mizner, the last a singularly talented artist whose relationship with his troubled brother Wilson is, in Mr. Knowlton’s expert telling, worth the price of admission.
... does not remotely make the case that the Florida land boom of the 1920s 'brought on the Great Depression.' (Knowlton, in fact, effectively disavows the assertion himself, so I’ll blame an overweening publisher for the misleading subtitle.) But the book does offer a story that, though often told before, is worth the spirited retelling Knowlton brings to it ... Knowlton is not the most sure-footed of anecdotalists. Especially in his opening chapters, the reader is too often led to the edge of a telling revelation only to find nothing there...But once Knowlton gets to the bubble’s inevitable puncture, the sheer gravitational pull that eventually grounds all speculative balloons exerts its irresistible power. Ambition morphs into mendacity, the profit motive becomes avarice ... The one great weakness of Bubble in the Sun is the absence of those suckers. Entirely missing are the hapless (or, if you prefer, foolish, or credulous, or maybe just plain greedy) individuals who climbed aboard the bandwagon — earnest dreamers who thought they were buying a retirement haven on a beach but ended up with a patch of fetid swamp; small-time speculators who made some fast money, then crashed while reaching for yet more; the thousands upon thousands you can find lingering at the finishing line of any speculative mania, left holding nothing but scraps of worthless paper.
Carl Hiaasen could have cooked up Knowlton’s cast of characters ... This crowded stage poses risks that Knowlton doesn’t entirely avoid. His pacing flags when the focus shifts to Douglas, whose great achievements as a crusading Everglades conservationist would come decades in the future, after the land-rush years. She simply doesn’t have enough to do to make her appearances compelling. More troubling is a frustrating sin of omission ... The banks that had bet their solvency on...future development failed, wiping out the savings of countless depositors. Knowlton concedes the embargo imposed a 'forced recess' in the frenzy. As such, it surely deserved some of the attention devoted to Marjory Douglas. Still, Knowlton delivers a captivating story, bubbling with colorful anecdotes and surprising research.
... a lively and entertaining chronicle of the visionaries, rascals and hucksters who transformed Florida ... Unfortunately, Knowlton seeks to do much more than tell the rollicking tale of modern Florida’s roots. He also posits, using something akin to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that the bursting of Florida’s 1920s land bubble 'triggered the nationwide epidemic and social trauma that followed' and is the reason it lasted 'so long and was so devastating' ... Still, as the stock market now routinely soars to new heights and online shoppers click their way to massive credit card balances, it’s worth considering what Knowlton has to tell us about what happens when the prospect of massive profits makes people take leave of their senses — as they did in Florida with such ingenuity and often reckless hilarity ... The problem with Knowlton’s premise is that he keeps undercutting his arguments by pointing out that Florida had much in common with the rest of the country ... he never convincingly explains why Florida is patient zero in the contagion ... This mostly engaging book might have been better served if the title had stopped at Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and left it at that.
... entertaining ... Knowlton profiles each location’s primary investor and promoter, skillfully presenting their personalities as they amassed fortunes, only to end as paupers ... Knowlton delivers a vibrant, eminently readable cautionary tale about business and cultural history.
Colorful stories of outrageous ambition and excess are tempered by brief discussions of the environmental consequences of development, especially in the Everglades...The economic argument suggested by the subtitle is saved for the end, in which Knowlton draws a convincing comparison between 1920s Florida and the early 2000s surge in real estate speculation ... Recommended for readers interested in the history of Florida and those who enjoy stories of the rich and glamorous in the 1920s.
A well-told history of the 1920s Florida land rush, the developers who fueled it, and an environmentalist who saw its dangers ... In an especially strong chapter, Knowlton argues cogently that while the collapse of the bubble alone didn’t cause the Great Depression, 'the Sunshine State did provide both the dynamite and the detonator' ... A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.
... [a] vivid narrative ... Knowlton successfully captures the vibrancy and mixed legacy of Florida’s boom years and makes a convincing, if familiar, case for the state as an economic bellwether.
