It is difficult to go wrong when writing of questionable behavior and wretched excess in Florida, a fact that is borne out yet again in Christopher Knowlton’s colorful Bubble in the Sun, a wide-ranging treatment of the ill-fated South Florida land boom of the 1920s.

... does not remotely make the case that the Florida land boom of the 1920s 'brought on the Great Depression.' (Knowlton, in fact, effectively disavows the assertion himself, so I’ll blame an overweening publisher for the misleading subtitle.) But the book does offer a story that, though often told before, is worth the spirited retelling Knowlton brings to it.

Carl Hiaasen could have cooked up Knowlton’s cast of characters.

... a lively and entertaining chronicle of the visionaries, rascals and hucksters who transformed Florida.

... entertaining.

Colorful stories of outrageous ambition and excess are tempered by brief discussions of the environmental consequences of development, especially in the Everglades...The economic argument suggested by the subtitle is saved for the end, in which Knowlton draws a convincing comparison between 1920s Florida and the early 2000s surge in real estate speculation.

A well-told history of the 1920s Florida land rush, the developers who fueled it, and an environmentalist who saw its dangers.

... [a] vivid narrative.