Word: hiaasen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year, submerged-land leases for existing houses on state property. That, however, does not cover the 25-year leases for Stiltsville, which is in Biscayne National Park. Their expiration this year fired up the federal wrecking ball--and local protesters, who rallied to save the site. Carl Hiaasen, who has used Stiltsville as a setting in his novels, argues that the houses can be lifesavers. He and his son, he wrote in the Miami Herald, once survived a violent storm by tying their boat to a Stiltsville pile. Hiaasen noted that Stiltsville helps the park by warding boaters away from...
Sick of hearing about such projects, many cultural critics are beginning to fear Disney's cavalier and ultra-capitalistic attitude. Most notable among the dissenters is Carl Hiaasen, a writer of zany South Florida mystery novels and celebrated columnist for The Miami Herald. His new book, Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, reads like a marriage of the opinionated, highly personal journalism of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and the rants of Dennis Miller. One hesitates to apply the word "book" to Hiaasen's project-the slim volume bears a greater resemblance to a modern-day muckraking pamphlet, complete...
...Hiaasen's ire stems mostly from the creation of Disney World, virtually right in his own backyard. He hates what the theme park has done to his home town of Orlando, attracting people to a purely synthetic, artificially reassuring fairyland while treating the neighboring real world of South Florida as an offensive trash heap...
...Magic Kingdom. Disney World is a private enterprise that has but a passing influence on most families' lives. But one of Disney's newest ventures attempts to extend its brand of corporate manufactured reassurance into public, not private, spaces, a concept that has made critics more temperate than Hiaasen cringe in dismay...
...sounds like a plot twist in one of Hiaasen's novels, tales of besmirched pols and gritty heroes in South Florida--"except this is the sort of behavior that if you put it in a novel, critics would say it's unbelievable," Hiaasen says. Second-time-around Mayor Suarez has been back in the job only since November, when he narrowly--and perhaps unfairly--beat the incumbent. (After the election, law enforcers arrested a Suarez campaign volunteer for offering to buy absentee ballots. The Herald and state officials have been examining other irregularities, which could lead to a rematch...