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Saturday, March 12, 2005

Carl Hiaasen's Birthday

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite authors:

Carl Hiaasen [pronounced "hiya-sun"] Birthday (born March 12, 1953)
Born and raised in Plantation, Florida (near Fort Lauderdale), Carl was the first of five children and the son of a prostitute, Odel. He married Connie Lyford just after high-school graduation and entered Emory University in 1970. In 1972 he transferred to the University of Florida, graduating in 1974 with a degree in journalism. After two years as a reporter for Cocoa Today out of Cocoa, Florida, he joined the Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ in 1976, where he still works. From 1979 he turned to investigative journalism, concentrating on construction and property development - exposing schemes to destroy, for profit's sake, Florida's natural beauty. From 1985 he has had a column in the Herald, initially thrice-weekly it now appears once a week.

Eventually, in the 1980s, he embarked on a career as a novelist. He co-wrote three thrillers with fellow-journalist Bill Montalbano - Powder Burn (1981), Trap Line (1981), A Death in China (1986). After Montalbano became a foreign correspondent, Hiaasen wrote his first book, Tourist Season (1986) - introducing many of his distinctive styles and themes. Hiaasen's fiction mirrors his concerns as a journalist and Floridian. His novels have been classified as "environmental thrillers" and are usually found on the crime shelves in bookshops, although they can just as well be read as mainstream satires of contemporary life. Hiaasen's Florida is that of greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, apathetic retirees, intellectually challenged tourists, and militant ecoteurs. It is the same Florida of John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee, but aged another 20 years and viewed with a more satiric or sardonic eye.

Bibliography

Fiction
Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993) (filmed in 1996 as Striptease, starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Hoot (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)

With Bill Montalbano
Powder Burn (1981)
Trap Line (1982)
A Death in China (1984)

Non-Fiction
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World (1998)
Kick Ass (1999)
Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns (2001)

Carl Hiaasen's homepage http://www.carlhiaasen.com/

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