MILT THOMAS

At least that is the name of his latest book (Chasing the Wind), which is quite a departure from his prior efforts. Johnson recently gave a presentation at the Emerson Center about his father’s U-boat encounter off the Vero Beach coast during World War II. That was based on his first book, Different Battles: The Search for a World War II Hero (1999). Then he wrote The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown: 60 Years of Baseball in Vero Beach (2008), which came out just as the Dodgers were abandoning Vero for Arizona.

His latest book is even a further departure from the first two. Chasing the Wind: Inside the Alternative Energy Battle is about wind farms. That’s right…wind farms. But if his first two books are any indication, readers will find it an engaging study in a field obscure to most of us.

According to Johnson, “In each case I would become interested in a subject and then decide to write a book. “I spend my summers in West Virginia, my home state. Back in 2006, there was a wind farm controversy up there and the idea was rejected. But I started researching wind farms. Soon after that, FPL was thinking of putting a wind farm in St. Lucie County, but that didn’t happen either. By then I was researching the subject in other states and in Europe. The result is this book, which is published by the University of Tennessee.”

Incidentally, FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc., which is North America’s largest producer of electricity utilizing wind-powered turbines. However, none of their turbines are in Florida. To find out why and learn everything you never knew about wind farms, you should come to Johnson’s presentation and book signing at the Vero Beach Book Center on Monday, April 7^th at 6:00 p.m. You will have a great time listening to Rody Johnson Chasing the Wind.