Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden

Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden by Michele Oka Doner. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780061346163.

Miami Beach is the story of an extraordinary time and place, told through the prism of two founding families, the Wolfsons and the Okas. The authors fathers were each mayors of Miami Beach, one in the 1940s and the other in the 50s and early 60s, and their mothers were prominent first ladies, who regularly welcomed the crème de la crème of society to their enchanting city. The Wolfsons and Okas exhaustive family archives provide a rich cultural, architectural, political, social, botanical, stylistic, gastronomic, geological, and poetic history of the contemporary phenomenon that is Miami Beach. At once an intimate memoir, a sprawling history, and a work of great artistic integrity, Miami Beach invites you to step back into a world so visual, mythical, and filled with family lore that its local intensity illuminates a national character.