Miami, City of the Future

Allman (Unmanifest Destiny brings a glowing ambience to his multifaceted treatment of Miamiclearly because he is enamored of the city's growth in our own time to become a metropolis teeming with complexities and contradictions, a ""melting pot'' thrown open by the Cuban tidal wave of recent years. A journalist with outstanding narrative skill, Allman traces Miami's growth from the time of Julia Tuttle and Henry Flagler through its real-estate boom (and bust) of the 1920s to the ``new Casablanca'' image its rampant drug-trade and political turmoil have given it in the 1980s. Colorful anecdotes abound, and readers will enjoy Allman's many revealing sidelights and personal profiles as he proposes, with delicious irony, a monument to JFK and Fidel Castro as ``co-founders'' of this new Miracle City. (April)