Where do I even start with this? I'll start by saying this review isn't going to be much use to anyone. My biases both for and against it are numerous and strong.
On the negative side: I know the author. I've known her for ... god, decades. And I'm not her greatest fan, and neither is she mine. I write this knowing that odds are good she's got google alerts turned on, and is therefore likely to see it. I doubt she'd disagree; she undoubtedly thought me a spoiled princess (I was spoiled), and I thought her unsupportably arrogant and bossy. I can find arrogant amusing, but I'm afraid I've never handled bossy people gracefully.
Now that I've aired that dirty laundry, my bias on the positive side is so strong I bought the book in spite of myself, and paid an exorbitant amount to ship it here. Because Englewood is not only my home town, it was my father's home town too, and my grand-daddy was one of the first to settle it in the early 1900's, coming to help his uncle in the logging industry, but staying for the fishing. I grew up hearing the stories of living in Florida when nobody else did, begging my dad to tell them after dinner on the weekends.
My daddy was incredible at telling a story, and I wasn't the only one who thought so. He was interviewed often by area reporters during slow news cycles, and Harris was a columnist for the town newspaper, specialising in chronicling the history of Englewood's pioneers, many of whom were at least as good at telling a story as my daddy was. This book is a collection of some of those columns, making it esoteric in the extreme, and therefore of little interest to anyone outside Florida, but incredibly precious to me.
The writing is nothing special; she often repeats herself within the same column, and there are numerous typographical errors; at least once she got someone's name wrong and in one column, the place she was talking about moved locations midway through; the print quality of the book itself, and the images, is ... not great. But it doesn't matter; I don't hear her when I read these stories - I hear the people who told them, in their voices, as I knew them when there were alive. Harris can harp about copyright all she wants, but these aren't her stories or her recollections; for me she'll only ever be the transcriptionist, and because of that I can love this book and appreciate her efforts to record what is really my history, before it was lost for good.