Book excerpt: Highway A1A: Florida at the Edge is more than an insightful guide to the cities and towns along Florida's Atlantic coast. It is also the dramatic story of how tourism begat development, how development begat sprawl, and how this coastal corridor, almost out of the blue, created Florida's original year-round residential downtowns with the power to transform how Floridians live and how the world vacations in the Sunshine State. Highway A1A is anecdotal, authoritative, humorous, and wide-ranging. Passionately Floridian travel writer and tourism analyst Herbert Hiller offers a fuller and more balanced story about Florida's Atlantic coast than any other guidebook. Exploring towns from Callahan to Key West, Hiller covers Florida's 13 Atlantic counties, providing maps, historical and present-day photographs, and recommendations for places to visit, lodge, eat, and shop that are truly local in character. Whether you're a tourist or a roving Floridian looking for some diversion not far from home, Highway A1A will put you in touch with what makes the Atlantic coast special--its dynamic sites and sights.