Jared Free - "A Land Remembered"

There's is one book that I could read over and over again. A Land Remembered, by Patrick Smith is just one of those timeless novels that never gets old; every time you read it you notice or realize something new. A Land Remembered tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey arrives in the Florida wilderness to start a new life with his wife and infant son, and ends two generations later in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that the land has been exploited far beyond human need. Although I thoroughly enjoy it, I'm always saddened as the wilderness in the story is transformed from wild and uninhibited, beautiful; to an environment more similar to what we see today, over developed ocean front, drained swamp land and lakes, etc. I feel guilty after hearing about the transformation that Florida, and the rest of the country, has undergone; how it's been destroyed. I feel guilty because I've gained from these developments. I've stayed in the hotels, I've lived in the condos, I've even the food that comes from the grounds of cleared lands. I wish there was a way to turn things back, to go back even just 60 or 70 years, when Florida was still a wild landscape, and keep everything from happening.