The Books Briefing: How to Tell a Story About Florida

“To try to understand this most incomprehensible state, we need varied and probing narratives, ones that change as Florida changes and are told by people who love the state too deeply to refrain from blistering criticism.”

📚 In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida, by Kent Russell

Walt’s world

“The end of the golden age of Disney animation marked the start of both the studio’s precipitous artistic decline and its astonishing economic success.”

📚 Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler

📚 The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, by Richard Schickel

📚 The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, by Steven Watts

Why the Gulf Coast is uniquely vulnerable to disasters

“People don’t just find themselves in places vulnerable to flooding. They are pushed there by racial injustice, economic inequality, and short-term, profit-driven development practices.”

📚 Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience, edited by Cindy Ermus

Jesmyn Ward’s eerie, powerful unearthing of history

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is Ward’s third novel and her most ambitious yet. Her lyrical prose takes on, alternately, the tones of a road novel and a ghost story … The novel explores both the deep effects of racism and injustice on [a] fractured family, and the ways its members punish themselves for how they’ve chosen to cope.”

📚 Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward

We sell ourselves stories in order to live

“South and West, as it happens, arrives on the scene during a moment of deep anxiety, in American culture, about stories … Who has the power to tell ‘our’ stories? Who should have it? When telling the story of another, where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? Where does my story end, and yours begin?”

📚 South and West: From a Notebook, by Joan Didion
📚 The White Album, by Joan Didion
📚 Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading right now is Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi.

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Kate Cray is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.