Author of satirical novels including
Strip Tease and
Native Tongue, Carl Hiaasen is known best in
Miami as a
columnist for the
Miami Herald. He has attacked corruption and idiocy where he has found it (and you have to be fairly thick to find none in Miami), even when it was the Herald's publisher who was making a dumb move (in this case, acting as if he was qualified to hold public office, a notion of which Hiaasen quickly -- and savagely -- disabused him).
Hiaasen's columns frequently eulogize the Everglades, which has been dying in pieces ever since the melaleuca was introduced to drain the swamp and shows few signs of surviving the encroachment of yet more subdivisions. He is genuinely outraged at the death of the Florida he has always known, and commiserates with buddy and fellow Florida Keys resident Jimmy Buffett now and then.
The best of his columns have been collected in Kick Ass (1999).