Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

by Carl Hiaasen

Overview

A collection of over 200 of best-selling author Carl Hiaasen's Miami Herald columns, written with the same dark humor & satricial wit as his fiction. Evokes the disastrously flawed paradise of modern South Florida, its developers, conmen, crooks, & cops.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813037899
Publisher:	University Press of Florida
Publication date:	10/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	829,627
File size:	685 KB

About the Author

Bestselling author Carl Hiaasen has written Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Sick Puppy, Skinny Dip, and many other novels that have helped define Florida noir. He is also the author of three popular books for young readers, Hoot, Flush, and most recently, Scat. His nonfiction includes Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World and Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport. A Florida native and lifelong resident, Hiaasen still writes regularly for the Miami Herald, where he has worked for 33 years and where these columns first appeared. His Web site is www.carlhiaasen.com. Diane Stevenson teaches research writing in the psychology department at the University of Florida.

Hometown:

Tavernier, Florida

Place of Birth:

South Florida

Education:

Emory University; B.A., University of Florida, 1974

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	xiv
1.	Welcome to South Florida	1
2.	Murder and Mayhem	32
3.	See It Like a Native	64
4.	Rules Are Different Here	83
5.	The War on Drugs	104
6.	Tourist Season	128
7.	A State of Chaos	158
8.	Cops, Courts, and Lawyers	173
9.	Candidates with Convictions	206
10.	Our Leaders on Parade	242
11.	Stormy Weather	269
12.	Tax Dollars at Work	293
13.	Ralph Sanchez and Other Subsidized Sports	313
14.	Choked on Growth	335
15.	Vanishing Florida	361
16.	The Everglades and Big Sugar	380
17.	Wild Kingdom	405
18.	Small Victories	422

Editorial Reviews

A collection of columns from the by the extremely popular mystery writer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

A public service to his many fans, this compendium of Miami Herald columns by best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen (Lucky You, 1997, etc.) reveals an angry, alert civic muckraker in the pugilistic vein of Mencken or Royko. Though best known for his ribald crime fiction, with its meticulous universe of South Florida idiocy and venal conspiracy, Hiaasen cut his teeth as an investigative reporter, and this spirit is strong in both his chosen subjects and his wry attention to unforgiving evidentiary detail. As editor Stevenson notes, the collection's thrust, which she constructed by sifting through Hiaasen's 1300-plus columns, was to present his advocacy of "realistic growth and decent government in Florida." Along the way Hiaasen stops to gut innumerable big fish—crooked politicians, rogue cops, insensate tourists, swollen developers—within a rough chronology reaching back to the cocaine-crazed Reagan '80s. Although Hiaasen is a truly funny writer, a stern moral compass lies beneath his slapstick. His quixotic outrage regarding the despoliation of his home state (cf. the columnist/terrorist of his Tourist Season, 1986) is as unforgiving as an Uzi, as authentic as a Waffle House breakfast. Hiaasen's zestful attacks on Miami's many embarrassing or indicted leaders end up addressing the threats posed, for instance, by the crash overpopulation of Florida, epitomized by the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Andrew upon shoddy developments, a dire issue that pro-business boosters (e.g., The Mouse) labor to minimize. But even the loopier pieces (tame dachshund-eating alligators, Geraldo Rivera's faked drug raids) are informed by Hiaasen's unforgiving focus upon the social rot beneath the zanyfacade. Such columns, like his fiction, reveal Hiaasen as a crystalline, pitiless seer of human weakness in much the same vein as his Floridian forbears, Charles Willeford and Harry Crews. Deeply satisfying, both for what it reveals of the serious priorities of a supposedly light novelist and for the outrageous epic of Florida profiteering and entropy within.

Kirkus Reviews