The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider's History of the Florida-Alabama Coast
"Hardy Jackson writes about the Redneck Riviera with an insight and love that makes you want to travel back in time and stick your toes in the sands of its history. He makes you want to splash in the water when it was still clear, and sway in a hammock before condominiums eclipsed the sky. He makes you want to shake hands with the pirates and reprobates who once roamed here, in a time when it was apparently perfectly legal to shoot your ex-wife as long as you warned her not to come within shooting range. This is more than a history of a place and its brushes with disaster—the BP spill—and its changing social landscape. It is a story of a coast and a man's relationship with it. Those of us who have stared into that blue-green water have waited on this book for a long time."—Rick Bragg, author ofThe Prince of Frogtown