In the Land of Good Living

In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell--broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure--set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the south, and literally vanishing into the sea,Florida (or, as he calls it: American Concentrate") seemed to Russell to embody America's divided soul. The journey with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy, drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium; attend a cuckold party. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II;and how it came to be a petri-dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly, diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety. Russell has taken it all in with his incomparably focused lens, and delivered a book thatis both an inspired travelogue and a profound rumination on the nation's soul--and his own. It is a book that is wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent--a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state"--