Closing Keynote Presentation
Michael Grunwald
Thursday, April 20, 2017 | 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Michael Grunwald is a best-selling author, a senior writer for Politico Magazine, and the Editor-at-Large of POLITICO’s new public policy site, The Agenda. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, and many other honors.
After growing up on Long Island and graduating from Harvard College, Mike spent six years as a reporter for The Boston Globe. In July 1998, he joined the national staff of The Washington Post, where he was an investigative reporter, political reporter, New York bureau chief and Outlook essayist; he also wrote the lead news story on the September 11 attacks. He joined TIME Magazine as a senior national correspondent in 2007, writing several dozen cover stories as well as columns about politics and energy.
In 2014, Mike started at POLITICO, where he has covered the Obama administration and the 2016 campaign. He has appeared on every major television network, and often does public speaking about national politics and policy as well as Florida issues.
In 2006, Simon & Schuster published Mike’s first book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. It was praised as “brilliant” (The Washington Post), “magnificent” (The Palm Beach Post), and “terrific” (The New York Times). In August 2012, Simon & Schuster published his second book, The New New Deal: The Hidden History of Change in the Obama Era. It received similar critical acclaim—The Economist and The Guardian both declared it the best book about the Obama administration—and made the New York Times best-seller list.
Mike is married to Cristina Dominguez, an attorney. They live in South Beach with their son Max, their daughter Lina, and their Boston Terriers Candy and Cookie.
For more information about Mike Grunwald, visit his official web site at: www.michaelgrunwald.com
Stay afterward for a BOOK SIGNING and chance to meet the author.
Thursday, April 20, 2017 | 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Both of the following books will be available at $20 each (cash only please).
The Swamp
The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
New York Times Bestseller
Synopsis
The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it. The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man’s abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America’s most beguiling but least understood patches of land.
The Everglades was America’s last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished.
Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
The New New Deal
The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
New York Times Bestseller
Synopsis
In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with over 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era.
The stimulus launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of anti-poverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network.
Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on Cabinet meetings, recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative, and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
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