Luckily, that morning's New York Times was providing a review of just that—a Hiaasen release called 'Squeeze Me,' another Florida-based romp through a cast of characters that are somehow resembling the current president, the Palm Beach charity crowd, and of course the blue collar people who make the line move, like Angie Armstrong, a convicted felon who has done time, as a self-employed wildlife animal wrangler who gets called to the rich properties to rid them of wildlife invaders, ranging from hungry raccoons, wrecking kitchens, to 20-foot pythons taking postprandial snoozes in trees after ingesting a big meal. "Is anyone missing a goat," Angie asks the groundskeeper in all seriousness.
I love hardcover books, but Jesus, they've started getting expensive when new. Carl's latest lists for $28.95 (U.S., always more in Canada. How do they afford it?) The discount doesn't lower the price much, either. Regardless, I had to have it.
You can always tell when a publisher has something invested in one of their authors. The physical book shows expense—and the price reflects it. The glossy cover is embossed. My older cousin once ran a commercial printing shop on Hudson Street in New York, Lyn-Art, and their business consisted of producing book covers.
I met him years ago and took a tour of his printing operation. He had an enormous Heidelberg press and large format cameras to turn the publisher's artwork into embossed book covers. His company had an exclusive on producing the covers to the 'Little House on the Prairie' books. My cousin Jimmy, went to Printing High School in the city when the city had numerous trade schools, incubators for manufacturing jobs. Something that doesn't exist today.
If you're familiar with Hiaasen's books you know the covers are a great palette of pastels, almost like the buildings in South Beach, Miami. They look great lined up on the shelf. I have several. The back fly leaf credits the front cover to VectorStock and tells us the image is "python skin texture." I wouldn't have known that without looking at the credit.
I've written before about enjoying Mr. Hiaasen's books, and this one did not disappoint. I quickly encountered Kiki Pew of Palm Beach who has gone missing from a gala, and Angie Armstrong, the wildlife wrangler who gets the frantic calls to remove wildlife invaders.
The python had been introduced, along with a treatise about how pythons have taken a liking to Florida's climate and have reproduced faster that post-war couples at drive-ins, with no one building them housing.
This posting is not meant to be a review, even though I've just finished reading the book. It's rather going to be a listing of the clever turns of phrase that Mr. Hiaasen uses that make the reading enjoyable. If you like words and humor, you'll like what you read.
The book is a generous 336 pages, with ragged right pages and a top-flight typeface. Classy. It's taken me several bedtime readings to finish it, but even at $28.95 before the discount, I'm confident I've gotten my money's worth.
I love hardcover books, but Jesus, they've started getting expensive when new. Carl's latest lists for $28.95 (U.S., always more in Canada. How do they afford it?) The discount doesn't lower the price much, either. Regardless, I had to have it.
You can always tell when a publisher has something invested in one of their authors. The physical book shows expense—and the price reflects it. The glossy cover is embossed. My older cousin once ran a commercial printing shop on Hudson Street in New York, Lyn-Art, and their business consisted of producing book covers.
I met him years ago and took a tour of his printing operation. He had an enormous Heidelberg press and large format cameras to turn the publisher's artwork into embossed book covers. His company had an exclusive on producing the covers to the 'Little House on the Prairie' books. My cousin Jimmy, went to Printing High School in the city when the city had numerous trade schools, incubators for manufacturing jobs. Something that doesn't exist today.
If you're familiar with Hiaasen's books you know the covers are a great palette of pastels, almost like the buildings in South Beach, Miami. They look great lined up on the shelf. I have several. The back fly leaf credits the front cover to VectorStock and tells us the image is "python skin texture." I wouldn't have known that without looking at the credit.
I've written before about enjoying Mr. Hiaasen's books, and this one did not disappoint. I quickly encountered Kiki Pew of Palm Beach who has gone missing from a gala, and Angie Armstrong, the wildlife wrangler who gets the frantic calls to remove wildlife invaders.
The python had been introduced, along with a treatise about how pythons have taken a liking to Florida's climate and have reproduced faster that post-war couples at drive-ins, with no one building them housing.
This posting is not meant to be a review, even though I've just finished reading the book. It's rather going to be a listing of the clever turns of phrase that Mr. Hiaasen uses that make the reading enjoyable. If you like words and humor, you'll like what you read.
The book is a generous 336 pages, with ragged right pages and a top-flight typeface. Classy. It's taken me several bedtime readings to finish it, but even at $28.95 before the discount, I'm confident I've gotten my money's worth.
Mr. Hiaasen's book is dedicated to his brother Rob, who was killed in a mass shooting on June 28, 2018 at the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. Maryland, when a lone gunman stormed the newsroom and killed five people. I remember the incident, but I wasn't aware of the relationship Carl had to one of the victims. Apparently, the Hiaasen family boasts a number of family members as newspaper journalists.
Right from page one Mr. Hiaasen has set a word standard for describing untold wealth. The Palm Beach crowd is the 1% of the 1%. I once read Russell Baker describe wealth as being beyond that of Croesus. I had to look it up, but Croesus was a fabulously wealthy king. The richest guy on earth.
Mr. Hiaasen puts Palm Beach wealth a little more prosaically when he tells us..."Kiki Pew was seventy-two years old and, like most of her friends, twice widowed and wealthy beyond the need for calculation." You get the idea. As rich as Croesus.
The pandemic has upset all sorts of activities, one of which is the book tour interviews held at say a Barnes and Noble. I would have liked to have attended a Hiaasen one in New York, but rather had to get my fix by taking in a YouTube video with his editor at Random House. No questions from the audience there.
The book opens with the goings on of the Gold Coast chapter of the IBS Wellness Foundation, a group globally committed to defeating Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Kiki Pew decided to join the POTUS Pussies, a group of Palm Beach women who proclaimed brassy loyalty to the new crude-spoken commander-in-chief. For media purposes they had to tone down their name or risk being snubbed by the island's PG-rated social sheet, so in public they referred to themselves as the Potussies.
More outtakes:
...the chromium haired heiress of two separate liquor fortunes, tag-teaming a dazed young polo star from Barcelona.
I can see him now; tanned like George Hamilton
His name was Huff Cornbright, of the anti-freeze and real-estate Cronbrights..
Rich people make money from prosaic sources. Things like brake shoes. Remember Niles Crane on 'Frazier' whose wife Marist, who we never saw, who came from a family that was vastly enriched by the manufacturing of "urine cakes" that sat inside countless urinals across the nation? They were the market, apparently.
She chose Mott Fitzsimmons, of the asbestos and textile Fitzsimmons...
Mauricio looked as if he'd rather be in the front row at a German opera...
Luckily, I've never been exposed to that experience from any row. Wagner scares me.
A python that size shits like a fire hose.
That's a frightful thought, considering when I was a little kid visiting a dairy farm owned by my mother's nursing friend from the Army, and her husband in upstate New York, when a visit to the barn afforded the unmistakable whiff of hay and manure, and the sound of fresh plops coming from the 28 cows that were waiting to be milked. I can still recreate the sound in my head. Thankfully, not the smell.
A python that size shits like a fire hose.
That's a frightful thought, considering when I was a little kid visiting a dairy farm owned by my mother's nursing friend from the Army, and her husband in upstate New York, when a visit to the barn afforded the unmistakable whiff of hay and manure, and the sound of fresh plops coming from the 28 cows that were waiting to be milked. I can still recreate the sound in my head. Thankfully, not the smell.
It was a Glock nine, of course, the favored armament of the white suburbanites.
Gun sales seldom decrease. Take in the Op-ed piece from a recent Wall Street Journal.
The toxicology report showed she had enough Xanax in her blood to etherize a sumo wrestler.
...freshly divorced, self-discovering female yoga fanatics that traveled in packs, ever-alert and lithe as meerkats.
These women are always thin. And a meerkat, being a species of monkey, who is probably flexible enough to satisfy themselves. No wonder they're always excited.
...stole a white Chevy Malibu from an alley behind a discount liposuction clinic.
A discount I guess is offered if you only want to lose half the weight.
...she gave a firm yank on the noose. It elicited from Germaine a sound that one might hear from a coyote with stage-four COPD."
And of course, if you watch even a little television, you can probably name three products that are being advertised that will treat your COPD. Not sure about stage-four though. Sounds quite serious. Probably fatal.
It made enough sense to Uric. He was grinning like a chimp that picked a padlock at a banana warehouse.
Yirma Skyy Frick, of the personal-lubricant Fricks...
More people rich as Croesus.
...the culprit should be dragged by his hairy nut sack straight from the booking desk to the death chamber. "Do not pass Go," erupted Deirdre Cobo Lancôme. (A member of the POTUSSIES.)
Mastodon railed a while longer, making air quotes with his stubby dolly fingers...
Mastodon is the name Mr. Hiaasen has created that the Secret Service are using as a code name for the president, who is of course a character who is without any coincidence, President Donald Trump. Mockingbird is the First Lady Melania.
It was the third dead body he's found while fishing, but such was the reality of a childhood spent outdoors in Florida. It was a testament to the teen's passion for angling that he's never considered getting a new hobby.
Christian raised his hands like a teller in a bank robbery...
Silk rockets were the world's finest prophylactics, manufactured by quality-conscious, hyper-precise Swedes. Five stars on Amazon.
"Least he [the president] doesn't smoke or drink."
"No, but he gobbles Aderalls like jellybeans. That's how he stays up all night tweeting. The pills man."
"Do they also make you forget how to spell?"
"Meanwhile my husband [the president] is screwing a stripper who's masquerading as a nutritionist of all things. I'm sure you people [the Secret Service] know all about this. She's got an ass like a Volvo sedan."
Mar-a Lago is renamed Casa Bellicosa.
Carl's recurring character Skink makes an appearance a little after the halfway point of the book. Skink is the former governor of Florida who has gone completely off the rails and lives on a tree island in the Everglades. Skink is really Clinton Tyree, an eco-terrorist who is trying to avenge every ecological wrong ever committed in Florida. He is a busy man.
The mutt, which belonged to his stepbrother, attacked several other family members before succumbing to a heel kick delivered by a no-nonsense postal carrier who's once played collegiate soccer.
The dream of everyone who wants to take out a snarling, barking dog.
The only bad thing about reading a Carl Hiaasen book is that eventually you will reach the end, and it's too soon to count on your amnesia to start the book again so soon.
Mr. Hiaasen lives in the same news-saturated world we all live in, and absorbs all there is to know by just walking past a television. He just expresses what he sees in a somewhat different manner than we might, and that of course is what makes the book.
As I write this, the first presidential debate is due to be held this evening between President Trump and Joe Biden. My guess is Mr. Hiaasen will be watching, and perhaps starting to develop a sequel should Mastodon win the election, as predicted by many.
It's a great life when all you need to keep your creative juices flowing is an intake of the news.
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