Hiaasen

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.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories–large and small–that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction. Hiaasen offers his commentary—indignant, disbelieving, sometimes righteously angry, and frequently hilarious—on burning issues like animal welfare, polluted rivers, and the broken criminal justice system as well as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bernie Madoff's trial, and the shenanigans of the recent presidential elections. Whether or not you have read Carl Hiaasen before, you are in for a wild ride.

Here is Hiaasen doing what he does better than anyone else: spinning a tale at once fiercely pointed and wickedly funny in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what’s left of pristine Florida—now, of the Bahamas as well—get their comeuppance in mordantly ingenious, diabolically entertaining fashion.