Native Tongue (hiaasen 1991)

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results.

With its dozens of outlying islands and the native Conchs’ historically low regard for the law, Key West is a smuggler’s paradise. All that’s needed are the captains to run the contraband. Breeze Albury is one of the best fishing captains on the Rock, and he’s in no mood to become the Machine’s delivery boy. So the Machine sets out to persuade him. It starts out by taking away Albury’s livelihood. Then it robs him of his freedom. But when the Machine threatens Albury’s son, the washed-out wharf rat turns into a raging, sea-going vigilante.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce undoubtedly has a dart-pocked photograph of syndicated Miami Herald columnist Hiaasen tacked to the wall. For his second anthology of 200 columns, spanning 15 years, he takes readers on a head-shaking romp through a south Florida that they won't find in any tourist brochure. A true Florida patriot, Hiaasen exposes corruption, money-grubbing and rampant development. The volume picks up where its predecessor Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen left off. Stevenson, associate director of writing programs at the University of Florida, again edits. Hiaasen's writing is fearless and the targets endless: politicians, municipal employees, judges, lobbyists, zoning boards, evangelists, athletic franchises, environmental scofflaws, Disney, the NRA, Big Tobacco. In many cases, Hiaasen took these entities to task before it became fashionable.