Word: hiaasen
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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...
Best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen wrote those words, but you won't find them in yarns like Tourist Season or Strip Tease. Instead, Hiaasen was describing the real-life mayor of Miami in his newspaper column last month. "Mayor Loco," Hiaasen calls...
Mayor Xavier Suarez isn't pleased with the title, and for weeks he has threatened to sue Hiaasen and his paper, the Miami Herald. Last week, to emphasize his pique, Suarez phoned the Herald's advertising manager and left another warning on voice mail: "I note that we are subsidizing you and your newspaper with ads related to official notices of the city," Suarez growled. Echoing a bit of cold war lingo, he then urged the manager to "tell your maximum leader of the free world for the publishing company [translation: Herald president Joe Natoli] to be a lot nicer...
...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...
...which in turn involves her in the murderous machinations of corrupt rich people. But it forgets to explain persuasively what a nice girl like Erin is doing in a dump called the Eager Beaver, taking off her clothes for a living. Worse, according to Schickel, he misses novelist Carl Hiaasen's strength: setting mean-funny characters spinning through lowlife milieus. Yes, Burt Reynolds has some dirty, lively moments as a crooked, sex-starved Congressman. But the crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman1s fastidious reach...