Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to nominate the University Press of Florida for the state’s highest public service award.
After all, the publisher has brought Carl Hiaasen’s two collections of newspaper columns back into print in handsome trade paperbacks. Check out Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed (both University Press of Florida, $24.95 apiece).
Hiaasen has always said that if he isn't pissing people off, he isn't doing his job.
Will somebody please give this man a raise?
There’s something in these books to offend just about everybody – particularly morally challenged shitheels ass-raping Florida’s environment and destroying the fragile beauty of this magnificent and wacky state.
And if you don’t fall into that category, Hiaasen will probably still make you pretty mad. He might get you so angry you’ll get out of your chair and do something to stop the ecological and ethical erosion of the Sunshine State.
Lots of people know Hiaasen the novelist. His marvelous satirical books – Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Nature Girl and Lucky You among them – have sold truckloads of copies. He’s become a monster in young-adult fiction, with Hoot, Flush and Scat. And he is the Patron Saint of Golfers-Gone-To-Seed in his latest nonfiction best-seller, The Downhill Lie.
But a lot of his loyal fans don’t realize that despite his success, Hiaasen keeps his day job as a Miami Herald columnist. This probably saves him a lot of trouble. He doesn’t have to go looking for weirdness to put into his novels; all he has to do is page through the local section of his newspaper.
So he holds onto the newspaper job as a sort of reality check – or, since this is Miami, a surreality check.
These are books for Florida. Unlike his novels,these might not travel well. Hiaasen takes the “local columnist” thing seriously, and these pieces are specific to his beloved and vulnerable home state.
They are also well reported. Again, fans of his novels might not realize it, but Hiaasen was part of the Herald’s investigative team before he became a columnist in 1985. Unlike a lot of snoremonger columnists — who read the work of real reporters, then ruminate and deign to tell us what it all means — Hiaasen still does his legwork. He doesn’t sit on his can and comment on things he’s only read about. This guy never stopped reporting.
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2000.