Totch: A Life in the Everglades

by Loren G. "Totch" Brown

Book Overview

"Totch Brown's memoirs of vanished days in the Ten Thousand Islands and the Everglades--the last real frontier in Florida, and even today the greatest roadless wilderness in the United States--are invaluable as well as vivid and entertaining, for Totch is a natural-born story-teller, and his accounts of fishing and gator hunting as well as his life beyond the law as gator poacher and drug runner are evocative and colorful, fresh and exciting."--from...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813012287
• ISBN13: 9780813012285
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Interesting history of the Everglades

After going on a tour of the Everglades and hearing about Totch I decided to read his autobiography. A very entertaining and factual account of what life was like living in the Everglades. I would highly recommend the book.

Immerse yourself in the past

I received this book after a family member visited Totch country. As an avid historian I immediately dived in to this book and never looked back. It was an honest look at a "time forgotten" by a man who presented his life as it was, the good & the bad portions. Don't hesitate to buy this and take a journey with Touch. This is the real Florida & not the Disney version. I am making a special trip to Florida in January of 2008 just to visit this place with my two young boys!

An Amazing Life Story

This book is a wonderfully informative and touching story of a great and honorable man. Through Totch we learn of a nearly forgotten way of life and we see the Everglades as it used to be. I appreciate his honesty and plainspokeness and I'm thankful Totch made this book to preserve an important history. I also recommend the three movies made about him: Totch Brown's tales of the Everglades and 10,000 islands, The Everglades outlaw Totch Brown, and Yesterday's Everglades.

A view into the past...

Totch is a fascinating book written in a natural writer's style illustrating how it really was down in the islands.The chapters not only offer us the life of Totch Brown but share photos and history unmatched in any other source I have found. Any reader interested in Florida history and/or anyone who was mesmerized by Peter Matthiessen's trilogy (Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone) will revel in this book's information. The photographs add so much to the story offering a glimpse at this rather mysterious corner of Southwest Florida (where else, for example, can one see a photo of Ted Smallwood's store as it looked at the turn of the century?). I read it cover to cover without putting it down, and I turn to it often for Florida history/environmental/sociology information. A great find for any lover of Florida history! Totch offers us all a real glimpse into the lives and lore of inordinately tough, brave people who were real pioneers in a little known and enigmatic part of America.

A wonderful account of yesterday's Everglades & its people!

Peter Matthiessen, author of "Killing Mr. Watson," and a master in is on right, is definitely on the mark in describing Loren G. "Totch" Brown as "a natural-born story-teller." A wonderful account of yesterday's Everglades & its people, "Totch, A life in the Everglades" is so colorful and entertaining you'll almost feel the need to keep the mosquito repellent handy while reading it.