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A land of dreams and even wilder dreamers

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Special to The Times

In 1791, the American naturalist William Bartram described Florida as “inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing,” concluding that it was nothing less than “a glorious apartment in the sovereign palace of the Creator.” Unfortunately, others through the years decided that God’s aesthetic tastes were lacking. Diane Roberts’ intoxicating “Dream State” is a chronicle of the men who have attempted to remake Florida in their image. As Roberts indelibly puts it: “Florida’s always been passed around like a roofied-up girl at a fraternity party.”

But “Dream State” is also a celebration of Florida’s quirky resistance to tawdry makeovers. For despite the militant efforts of suburban developers, South Florida socialistas and the dopey Disney machine, Florida has always been, and to some extent remains, a whacky, woolly, reeling, wild-eyed place. That Florida is the Florida Roberts loves. Between the “silk-hat sunshine Florida of Tiffany glass and Worth Avenue gowns ... and the wool-hat shadow Florida of dogtrot cabins and collards patches,” Roberts proudly hails from the “shaded creeks and deep woods.”

Diane Roberts knows Florida. Aside from Ponce de Leon’s arrival in 1513 and the founding of St. Augustine (the oldest city in the United States) in 1565, there’s not much of the state’s history she doesn’t have a personal stake in. She is related to Charles Louis Napoleon Achille Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew who came to Florida to set up his own Xanadu, and whose wife, Catherine, George Washington’s great-grandniece, pulled a silken cord to fire the cannon announcing Florida’s secession from the Union.

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While attending Florida State, Roberts and her sorority sisters would dress up in Southern belle gowns and visit Princess Murat’s grave in Tallahassee, drinking and traveling through time. Later, she became a fan of Weeki Wachee Springs’ famous mermaids who perform plays while underwater. She has plumbed the snaky crevices of the Everglades, explored the funky wonder of the Keys and marveled at the spectacle of the 2000 presidential election. The brass at CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and the New York Times were stunned to find they’d been booted from their hotel rooms on the weekend of the Florida-Florida State football game. This wasn’t a “breakdown of Tallahassee’s much-touted hospitality,” Roberts explains, “it’s a matter of priorities.”

Anyone who loves Florida -- as opposed to loving what can be done with Florida -- is bound to be angry. This is, after all, a place where Michael Eisner and his Imagineers have created a bass fishing lake much like the countless perfect lakes with crystalline waters and white sand bottoms that have been thoroughly mucked up due in part to Michael Eisner and his Imagineers. If you want to know what a Florida lake looked like prior to Disney, why, Disney will charge you for it! “Disney World,” as Roberts shrewdly explains, “is close to being an extraconstitutional entity, a business palatinate within a soi-disant democracy.”

Yet Roberts, who is plenty angry about such things, writes with wit and joie de vivre.(And honesty -- her forebear Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward hatched a plan to drain the Everglades!) She has written a fitting chronicle of the state where Europeans made landfall and where humankind first lifted off to reach the moon.

Toward the end of this marvelous book, which provides first-rate history clothed in gossamer prose, Roberts concludes that Florida is the place where “dolphins still dance in the warm sea, waiting for another saint to appear to redeem the Land of Flowers, where it’s possible to believe many more than six impossible things before breakfast.”

In the meantime, readers will be more than satisfied with this sublime dream of a book.

Scott M. Morris is a native Floridian and the author of the novels “The Total View of Taftly” and “Waiting for April.”

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