The Swamp Peddlers
How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream
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Narrated by:
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Mike Chamberlain
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By:
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Jason Vuic
About this listen
Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build. The result created Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Deltona, Port Charlotte, Palm Coast, and Spring Hill, among many others - sprawling exurban communities with no downtowns and little industry but millions of residential lots.
As Jason Vuic recounts in this raucous history, these communities allowed generations of northerners to move to Florida cheaply, but at a price: High-pressure sales tactics begat fraud; poor urban planning begat sprawl; developers cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built thousands of miles of roads in grid-like subdivisions, which, 50 years later, played an inordinate role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
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In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon.
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chilling...
- By Kindle Customer on 10-12-19
By: Rachel Maddow
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The Yugo
- The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
- By: Jason Vuic
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and it is one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s.
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Better Than The Car!
- By Chris Reich on 08-25-10
By: Jason Vuic
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Electric City
- The Lost History of Ford and Edison's American Utopia
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.
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Feels incomplete
- By M on 12-12-23
By: Thomas Hager
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The Fine Print
- How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind
- By: David Cay Johnston
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
David Cay Johnston has made a name for himself as the defender of the common man, calling out the rich and powerful for cheating the system at the expense of everyone else. Whether he's exposing unjust loopholes in the tax code that help the rich get richer or pointing out how powerful corporations pocket government subsidies at excessive taxpayer expense, Johnston is an eloquent town crier for justice and equality.
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A must listen if you love or hate Trump
- By Rob D on 04-19-17
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Soul City
- Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia
- By: Thomas Healy
- Narrated by: Larry Herron
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Thomas Healy resurrects a forgotten saga of race, capitalism, and the struggle for equality in this fascinating, forgotten story of the 1970s attempt to build a city dedicated to racial equality in the heart of “Klan Country”.
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awesome narrator
- By Arthur F. Jackson on 06-23-21
By: Thomas Healy
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The Liar's Ball
- The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons
- By: Vicky Ward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Harry Macklowe is one of the most notorious wheelers and dealers of the real-estate world, and The Liar's Ball is the story of the gamblers and thieves who populate his world. Watch as Harry makes the gutsy bid for midtown Manhattan's famous GM building and puts almost no money down, landing the billion-dollar transaction that made him the poster child for New York's real-estate royalty. Listen in on the secret conversations, back-door deals, and blackmail that put Macklowe and his cronies on top - and set them up for an enormous fall.
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Excellent. Hope Biden Gets Covered Next
- By greenemann on 07-29-21
By: Vicky Ward
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Boardwalk Empire
- The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City
- By: Nelson Johnson
- Narrated by: Joe Mantegna, Terence Winter (foreword)
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
From its inception, Atlantic City has always been a town dedicated to the fast buck, and this wide-reachinghistory offers a riveting account of its past 100 year, from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to its rebirth as a legitimate casino resort in the modern era.
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The Unmasked History of Atlantic City
- By Steven Schuster on 08-07-10
By: Nelson Johnson
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The Big Rich
- The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
- By: Bryan Burrough
- Narrated by: James Jenner
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Best-selling author Bryan Burrough reveals how four Texas oil tycoons transformed America. Rising from humble beginnings through hard work and shrewd dealings, they shifted the balance of power in American politics. While hobnobbing with movie stars and presidents, the Big Rich also created the legend of the swaggering Texas oilman with island hideaways and sprawling ranches.
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Big, Sordid, Fascinating, PoliticallyCorrect
- By Darkcoffee on 11-09-09
By: Bryan Burrough
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Tokyo Underworld
- The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan
- By: Robert Whiting
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.
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A Man with a fork in a world of soup
- By Kindle Customer on 09-01-20
By: Robert Whiting
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The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, Second Edition
- By: Marc Levinson
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
From modest beginnings as a tea shop, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, with nearly 16,000 stores. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to mom-and-pop grocery stores across the nation. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, leading the Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman administrations to investigate the Great A&P. In a remarkable court case, the government pressed criminal charges against the company for selling food too cheaply - and won.
By: Marc Levinson
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The Boom
- How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
- By: Russell Gold
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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The Meat Racket
- The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business
- By: Christopher Leonard
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country's biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation's meat supply.
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Hits the nail on the head.
- By Anonymous 8888 on 02-04-15
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Crash Course
- The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
- By: Paul Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).
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Contemporary History at Its Best
- By Roy on 04-19-10
By: Paul Ingrassia
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Excellent historical tale
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Oh, Florida! To some people it's a paradise. To others it's a punch line. As Oh, Florida! shows, it's both of these, and, more important, it's a Petri dish, producing trends that end up influencing the rest of the country. Without Florida there would be no NASCAR, no Bettie Page pinups, no Glenn Beck radio rants, no USA Today, no "Stand Your Ground" - you get the idea.
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A book about the author's political views - boring
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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.
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This is not Jiminy Cricket's river
- By Robert R. on 09-02-18
By: Michael Grunwald
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Glass House
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The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.
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One irritating point...
- By Dan Pinkston on 02-07-20
-
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What listeners say about The Swamp Peddlers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- GM
- 03-21-23
Fascinating w great narration
I had no idea of the greed vs conservation that the state of Florida has received for the last 100 years.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-18-21
Florida Deserves Better
Jason did an excellent job in telling the story of the exploitation of Florida through an environmental and ecological lens. I appreciated the micro/ macro approach.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Melissa
- 08-14-23
Interesting History
Good educated read on the development of Florida. Shows the pitfalls of early development which had lead to todays Florida
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