Wed appreciated also dont go to our webpage books and books. Com give us your email address will send you emails about evan he was on at this location and our other locations idle for basement down to Coconut Grove recently we have a new store there as well. Another word worth at the adrian art center we have on january 26 at 630 you can buy tickets if there any Still Available thats at the art center. Org. Any number of wonderful events you can visit is here we do farm to table dinners, podcasts a lot of authors with their owner and Founder Mitchell Kaplan part you can only do that by accessing the webpage so please visit us there. Were very happy this evening to have with this with a bubble in the sun the florida boom of the 1920s and how it brought on the Great Depression. Its our fault. I thought there Something Else involved. Christopher is a former staff writer of the chief and Fortune Magazine he spent 15 years the Investment Business as previous book was cattle kingdom the Hidden History of the cowboy west please give him a nice warm welcome. [applause] thank you steve i appreciate that, good evening everyone. I appreciate your coming. Its nice to be back in coral gables. Seems like just yesterday i was here researching the career of George Merrick who is the founder of coral gables that is for this book bubble in the sun. The book is about florida and the roaring 20s its more importantly about the florida land boom which you may note was the greatest land boom in American History. As it happens one of the most impactful because of the role it played in the events that led up to the Great Depression. Now at the moment, as a writer i am specializing in writing about these unusual speculative frenzies my previous book, cattle kingdom published in 2017 was about the open range cattle era after the civil war thats the cowboy era. I discovered that it was little more than an investment bubble, a lot like the. Com bubble of the 1990s set of young men going out to california to join tech companies, they went to colorado and wyoming and montana to become cowboys and joint cattle ranches. One of these of course was teddy roosevelt. When i began prospecting for a sequel to cattle kingdom, i quickly hit on the florida land boom of the 1920s which is something i was familiar with. I grew up with grandparents on both coasts of florida. Both of whom had lived through the roaring 20s and also had a grandfather who was a Real Estate Developer are great grandfather who was a Real Estate Developer in westchester new york who lost everything in the Great Depression. So the subject matter spoke to me. And bubble in the sun looks like it will be the second of whats likely to be a trilogy. The third i think will be about the uranium boom of the 1950s which was the last american goldrush. These frenzies make very good subjects for works of narrative nonfiction. They have natural builtin arc you have the emerging of the boom, which is in this case the building of the roads and the railroads. The arrival of key figures in florida and the years leading up to the boom. Then you have the frenzy itself. Which could be described as one gigantic party. That of course is followed by the pain and tragedy of the bust which is the hangover. I think these are very american stories. Its every generation lives through one or two such booms and busts and virtually everyone learns painful lessons from them. Its really part of living in the free market system with capitalism. I like to think there is a more serious aspect to what i am doing, ive come to believe we need to look under the proverbial hood of these frenzies to better understand why they arose, what went wrong, and who or what might be to blame. Because of the economist john kenneth wrote quote regulation and outlaws financial. [inaudible] or mass euphoria, is not a practical possibility. In other words you cannot legislate away human gold ability. Books like these to explain and to teach people to be a little more careful with their investments. Not to be seduced by speculative frenzies because they do keep on occurring. These are cautionary tales. Now i soon discovered there really had not been a definitive history of the florida land broom ever written. As a couple short volumes but nothing i would describe as definitive nothing with endnotes in the bibliography. Thered been very few histories of Real Estate Development or speculation ever written. Thats all given how Many American fortunes have been made in real estate. I think ought to given that real estate speculation dates back to the earliest days of the republic. You can argue Christopher Columbus was talking about real estate you have the story of john jacob expanding the furred tray and manhattan real estate purchase on obvious opportunity here the more i looked into it the more fertile the territory began to appear. It was obviously rich subject matter and a chance to write about a fascinating. In American History. It was an especially colorful decade and that is replete with jazz, flappers, prohibition, from running, al capone, babe ruth, radios, automobiles. All of which i touch on in the book. Here is the books description of our capone. 6 feet tall and weighing 240 pounds, they gangster dressed immaculately when he went out on the town favoring a dark blue doublebreasted suit adorned with aye linen pocket square. And a matching polkadot necktie. He wore gold and diamond studded watch chain that he habit of fiddling with. On one pinky finger egg for carrot diamond ring and a platinum said to. The United States secret Service Agent who finally brought him down for by convicting him for tax evasion recalled big al having dark eyes, thick lips, perfect teeth, a big flabby paw and dainty manicured nails. 6inch scar from a knife fight in a bar ran down his left cheek. When the mobster pulled out a silk handkerchief, wilson got a width of his cologne, lily of the valley. But back to the conceiving of the book, there was yet another angle to my story. As of my first book, cattle kingdom, there is an environmental story to be told. What happened in the 1920s to the everglades. That is the primary aquifer which i dont need to tell you. Specifically of the trail during the decade which cut off most or much of the water flow to the everglades. With disastrous consequences for the wildlife in the entire ecosystem. It was shortsighted from an Economic Development standpoint too. That environmental story is an important component to this book. Because i firmly believe we can no longer separate economic wellbeing from environmental wellbeing. They are tied at the hip. British Prime Minister margaret thatcher, an unlikely spokesperson for the Environmental Movement may have put it best in an address to the Royal Society 30 years ago. She said, and i quote the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other. The World Wildlife fund elaborated on the sentiment when it noted all Economic Activity depends on Services Provided by nature. Now in the book, floridas aquaphor is of this serrated in the name of progress and development. And yet later, the state will be heavily dependent on that water you dont get much more shortsighted than that. Once i got started on the research, i realized how significant of the decades of the 20s was to American History as a whole. I think it is no exaggeration to say that it was the decade that defied contemporary america, its popular culture, its norms, and its preoccupations. For example, this is a decade will we became primarily a middleclass society and consumer driven society. Our lives revolved around automobile and mass media for the first time. Initially it was radio and television was soon to follow. Predominately urban and suburban and our focus for the first time. But definitely and deeply divided between urban and rural. This is the decade will be also became sports obsessed. We saw the rise of the nfl for the first time as well as professional golf and tennis. And to a similar extent i say we became obsessed for the first time at least overtly with that young women and half clad in advertisements as never before. Tell the story in the book of karl fisher, the developer at miami beach having scantily clad young girls as cheesecake with the ads he read on billboards in times square and to advertise miami beach. And also, we became debt driven for the first time. This is the decade when home mortgages and installment credit took hold. That would have profound implications for what happened during the Great Depression. And interestingly weve never been able to shake that addiction of debt ever since. Most people, remain just as indented coming out of the Great Depression as going in. That is if they had not been wiped out like my great grandfather. And finally, i would say this is the age where business comes to the four is preoccupation of most americans. The next thing i discovered there are some wonderful characters to write about in particular the four Great Developers of the era who are remarkably compelling people. I mentioned karl fisher at miami beach. You know about George Merrick here in coral gables, Addison Meisner and palm beach of boca raton and bp davis who is in tampa and saint augustine. Not to give you a flavor for these men let me just read a quick description of karl fisher. This is again from the book. Karl Graham Fisher was born into a middleclass family in greensboro indiana, 1874. The oldest of three boys he was bored with a stigmatism so severe that he was barely able to read the blackboard at school. He dropped out at age 12. Despite impaired eyesight he was an avid reader, a gifted athlete, a gleeful showoff. The best ice skater in indianapolis, he could also walk on stilts that stood a full story high stand on his head, tight rope walk, and outrun most of his classmates running backwards. In fact, one of his two wives would recall he was nearly as nimble with his feet as with his hands. Swap entrance watkins slope shouldered he would grow into a dimple grinning loser a poker player and unrepented womanizer who peppered his talk with profanity. He chewed tobacco, sometimes smoking a cigar the same time after biting off and swallowing the cigars tip. When he married his first wife, jane, 19 oh nine she was 24 and he was 35. But she was smitten. He was all speed i saw them so dazzling i could hardly look at him. But each of these developers who make a gigantic fortune in the 20s including 600 million to 1. 3 billion today. And then, enthralled to their success, go on to lose every penny of it. So each of their stories is her real life morality tale about greed, power, much like the greek tragedies. There is a fourth towering figure to emerge from this era and that was the in environmentalist marjorie stone. She go on to write the great book on the everglades youve probably heard of which was 1947 after years of devastation and throughout the everglades were on fire. She serves in the book as a counterpoint to the developers and their shortsighted development activities. That ended of course in disaster. She is really the conscious of this book. She outlives the developers happily buy 50 or 60 years living to be 108, winning a president ial medal of honor. As i got deeper into the actual research, i expect theres more to the story that met the. Pete overlooked the real significance of the boom or i should really say the bust because the bursting of the land boom was very likely the event that triggered the Great Depression. Just as it was real estate and not the stock market that triggered the Great Recession of 2008. So realistic, not the stock market, was the villain leading up to the 1930s. Now i dont want to oversimplify this and i tried not to in the book because i am cognizant of how complex our economy is and even was back then. There likely is not one single cause of the Great Depression. But as i say in the book, i think this is true. The collapse of the florida boom is what provided the dynamite and the detonator. Thats even though there was a lag time of a couple of years from when floridas real estate collapsed and when the National Economy collapsed. The same is true of 2008. Real estate started to roll over in late 2006. In florida and california, stock market did not decline until mid 2008. It takes a wild for a real estate collapse to play out. For me that was the final piece of the literary puzzle as far as i was concerned. I had what i needed to make an engaging book. Inherently interesting. Of time, a dramatic set of events, good characters, and eight novel theme which i think a book like this should have. Thats a story behind the conception of the book, the story how it was came to be written. In the broadest terms i would say the book is the watershed decade were we as a nation went from mom and pop ism to massmarketing, from fiscal responsibility to a reliance on consumer debts, and above all from rural naivete and innocence to urban maturity and sophistication as a nation. Although we had to go to the Great Depression to get there. Let me finish by just giving you an overview of florida in 19206. See if this doesnt echo with you when you look at the country today. Again i am quoting from the book here. In many ways the florida 1920s was a precursor of america 100 years later. Florida then, as in the United States at the moment had to affluent coast were separated by an impoverished and largely agricultural interior. Inequitable wealth wealth distribution, racial intolerance, xena phobia the kkk being the most blatant manifestation back then. These were combined to a dangerous overreliance on economics the structure were bankers and Business People wheeled an influence on policy. So to complete the analogy, the Political Leadership of the day displayed profound indifference to the fate of the environment and to societys less fortunate. Now i find these parallels uncaring the book i remind the reader it did not end well back then. That today, the risk of history repeating is real. So yes, the 20s was a glamorous prosperous fun decade full of sports stars, celebrities, starlets it was also a reckless, disruptive, money obsessed, scandal ridden and polarized decade two. In short, an era remarkably similar to the one we living through today. So i thank you for listening, i hope you read and enjoyed the book. I am happy to take any questions. [applause] i read something thats wrecked in the person answer the question. I heard in the 1920s scrupulous Land Developers attach oranges to mangoes and marketed them as orange groves. Is that true . A. [laughter] thats a story. I could not verify that. [laughter] it seemed rather impossible to me too. I am curious, how would you tell the story of George Merrick today . Speak to them glad you asked that question. I have a comment here about george. First i was very impressed to what he had accomplished here in coral gables. I had to admit it came as sort of a shock to me to it realize he was not all he was purported to be. I dont how many of you know this, hate might have been a bona fide crook when his business started to collapse in 1920s hated. [inaudible] repeatedly. Out of desperation he unloaded properties that he owned onto the new city of coral gables. At the same time, he leveraged the city up with debt in order to purchase those properties the city defaulted on them that was 1961. He got away with it, he got away with it and it helped with the statute of limitations. When it collapsed in florida it collapsed everywhere. There is such a back log of lawsuits. Ultimately hidden from the fcc. I think they shamed him a little bit. It was brushed under the covers. [inaudible] that story seems to be slept under the carpet revving who once their founder to be a failed Real Estate Developer with criminal acts. Especially in this day and age. [laughter] i think the truth will come out in the end. I think for you here in coral gables its quite interesting. Anyone else . Well thats great, i will be here to sign copies, happy to chat or answer questions as i do so. Thank you again. [applause] s direct thanks everybody dont forget we have copies of the book for sale out there, by four or five copies apiece. Can we can give another round of applause . [applause] [background noises] his thoughts on how prepared we are for the next major outbreak. Then a discussion about viruses from the 2016 brooklyn book festival featuring paul zimmer and eddie young, the later john berry describes in 1918 flu pandemic that killed 100 Million People worldwide. Enjoy book tv, now and over the weekend on cspan2. Last november we mark the centennial t