If the history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph,” writes Anne Hull, “it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de Léon, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping white settlers, the U.S. Army, Osceola, the great Seminole warrior, malaria, cattle, citrus, and a dull heat that left it undesirable for much besides oranges until the early 1960s, when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness, looked down, and said, ‘There.’”
If Hull’s history were likewise journalist, she was awarded, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting. But Hull’s warm and beguiling memoir,, focuses, like Disney, on that once-desolate sump of land in Florida’s middle, as though the precondition to understanding her life is understanding the place she was born and raised. “There,” it says.
