My two favorites were Hiaasen’s Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed. Apparently worried - and justifiably so - about my ability to transition from sports to news, friends began buying me books featuring some of America’s greatest columnists. Not that he ever knew it, but Carl Hiaasen was my mentor when I started writing metro columns in 2012. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started. We will miss his righteous rage in the pages of the Herald. He also calls out our elected “leaders,” the nation’s greatest collection of venal, clueless jerks determined to drain and pave every inch of the old green Florida in the name of profit. He sees us for what we are - on a good day, at least - a crazy quilt of eccentric characters unfazed by mosquitoes the size of ponies and sinkholes that can swallow up a house in minutes, delighting in the sheer weirdness of life at the bottom of America. Jeff KlinkenbergĬarl Hiaasen is Florida’s own Jonathan Swift, a satirist who looks at his native state with the appropriate combination of love and disgust. If I have one complaint about Carl - and I guess it’s a big one - it’s that he’s annoyingly tall and handsome. He doesn’t take cheap shots at the addled and unlucky souls lazy writers make fun of in those obnoxious “Weird Florida” stories. Most of us know him as a brilliant satirist from his novels, of course, but he’s also been the ferocious columnist, slayer of bad leaders and bad ideas, I will especially miss.
It’s how I think he formed his profound sense of place and the love for the environment he brings to his work. He grew up on the edge of the Everglades fishing for bass and catching snakes. We are walking among characters every day, if we only open our eyes, squint sideways and pop them back out onto the page. Reading Carl Hiaasen in every form helped me understand that all the absurd and wonderful material any writer ever needs is right here in the real world. It’s the combination that has been the most inspiring, the most instructive to witness. His columns and novels can stand apart, of course, exceptional in their own ways. Across Florida, a whole lot of bad actors must be doing the Snoopy dance at the news that he won’t be pointing that razor-sharp column at them anymore. Hiaasen defined outrage and voiced it for the rest of us. My native Floridian dad thoroughly enjoyed the regular comeuppance Carl Hiaasen gave certain politicians on the pages of the Herald, and he passed that on to me. On the occasion of Carl Hiaasen retiring from his column for the Miami Herald, we asked several current and former Tampa Bay Times columnists to weigh in on his career.
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