April 6 at 2 pm

Author Craig Pittman and Oh Florida! (Zoom)

To outsiders, Florida seems baffling. It’s a state where the voters went for Barack Obama twice, yet elected a Tea Party candidate as governor. Florida is touted as a care-free paradise, yet it’s also known for its perils – alligators, sinkholes, pythons, hurricanes, and sharks, to name a few.  It attracts 90 million visitors a year, some drawn by its impressive natural beauty, others bewitched by its man-made fantasies.
Oh, Florida!, by award-winning journalist Craig Pittman, explores those contradictions and shows how they fit together to make this the most interesting state.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian who writes a weekly column about environmental issues for the Florida Phoenix and co-hosts a podcast called “Welcome to Florida.” He has won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida four times, and twice won the top investigative reporting award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. He’s the co-author, with Matthew Waite, of Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss, (2009), which won the Stetson Kennedy Award from the Florida Historical Society. His other books include Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species (2010); the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country: and Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther. Oh Florida! won the gold medal in Florida non-fiction from the Florida Book Awards, and in 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Presented as part of the Sarasota County Centennial and One Book programming. Please check out our Calendar at https://scgov.net/Library, select Library Events and Filter by Virtual Events location to find Zoom programs and Register.