Miami Beach is the story of an extraordinary time and place, told through the prism of two founding families, the Wolfsons and the Okas. The authors' fathers were each mayors of Miami Beach, one in the 1940s and the other in the '50s and early '60s, and their mothers were prominent first ladies, who regularly welcomed the creme de la creme of society to their enchanting city. The Wolfsons' and Okas' exhaustive family archives provide a rich cultural, architectural, political, social, botanical, stylistic, gastronomic, geological, and poetic history of the contemporary phenomenon that is Miami Beach. At once an intimate memoir, a sprawling history, and a work of great artistic integrity, Miami Beach invites you to step back into a world so visual, mythical, and filled with family lore that its local intensity illuminates a national character.