For anyone who loves the old Florida and still has hope for the new one, The Tropic of Cracker is the state's truest road map and Al Burt is its most eloquent cartographer.The crack of the old-time cow hunter's whip gave the native Floridian a nickname, but Al Burt's book is a state of mind shared by those who love "what remains of the Florida that needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its creation, that was here before there was a can opener or a commercial or a real-estate agent."
In his years of roving the state as a Miami Herald columnist Burt mapped Florida with stories of Apalachicola to the Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys.
They were cow hunters, Conchs and alligator men. They grew oranges, sugarcane and muscadine grapes. They moonshine. They drove mules, ate fried mullet and told yarns in a Cracker Creole about panthers, snakes, alligators and hurricanes.
There are luminaries among them--Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Virgil Hawkins--but most were just regular folk who mark the borders of the elusive and magical Tropic of Cancer.
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