Description

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Winner • Pulitzer Prize for History

Winner • Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction

Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, Library Journal, and gCaptain

Booklist Editors’ Choice (History)

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

In this “cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin” (New York Times), “Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea” (front page, New York Times Book Review).

Hailed as a “nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller Collapse, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic” (Dallas Morning News), Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf is “by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea’ ” (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship with the environment from the age of the conquistadors to the present, Davis demonstrates how the Gulf’s fruitful ecosystems and exceptional beauty empowered a growing nation. Filled with vivid, untold stories from the sportfish that launched Gulfside vacationing to Hollywood’s role in the country’s first offshore oil wells, this “vast and welltold story shows how we made the Gulf . . . [into] a ‘national sacrifice zone’ ” (Bill McKibben). The first and only study of its kind, The Gulf offers “a unique and illuminating history of the American Southern coast and sea as it should be written” (Edward O. Wilson).

About the Author

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Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea and An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, he lives in Florida and New Hampshire.

Praise For…

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A sensitive and sturdy work of environmental history. . . . [Davis] has a well-stocked mind, and frequently views the history of the Gulf through the prism of artists and writers including Winslow Homer, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and John D. MacDonald. His prose is supple and clear. . . . A cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin.
— Dwight Garner - New York Times

A wide-ranging, well-told story, by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea.’
— Gerard Helferich - Wall Street Journal

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's best-seller Collapse and Simon Winchester's Atlantic comes Jack E. Davis' nonfiction epic, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, which strives both to celebrate and def