"Ruthlessly wicked...Wonderful...His best book yet." ATLANTA JOURNAL & CONSTITUTION When the precious clue-tongued mango voles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills on North Key Largo are stolen by heartless, ruthless thugs, Joe Winder wants to uncover why, and find the voles. Joe is lately a PR man for the Amazing Kingdom theme park, but now that the voles are gone, Winder is dragged along in their wake through a series of weird and lethal events that begin with the sleazy real-estate agent/villain Francis X. Kingsbury and can end only one way....
Writing like an Edward Abbey of South Florida, Hiaasen ( Skin Tight ) sets his reluctant journalist hero after a morally corrupt real estate developer planning to build an 18-hole golf course on North Key Largo. Burned out as an investigative reporter for a Miami newspaper, Joe Winder now writes PR releases for the Amazing Kingom of Thrills, a sleazy theme park owned by Francis X. Kingsbury, who hopes to increase his fortune with a nearby golf resort. When Winder learns that the purportedly last living pair of blue-tongued mango voles, recently stolen centerpieces of the Rare Animal Pavilion, are not an endangered species as claimed, he joins the forces opposed to his boss. These include the Mothers of Wilderness, an organization of well-heeled blue-haired activists, and a semi-crazy recluse named Skink, a former Florida governor who has become a sort of Robin Hood of the Keys. Hiaasen keeps a broad cast of zany characters--Winder's girlfriend answers the phone for a call-in porn service; a steroid-crazed, weight-lifting ex-cop ingests hormones from a portable IV--moving at a breakneck clip. Murders (one accomplished by an amorous rogue dolphin), explosive revenge taken on land-moving machinery, the triumphs of love found and principles regained, and the singular environment of the Florida Keys are ingredients of this sometimes scattershot but always inventive entertainment. 50,000 first printing; BOMC alternate. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Imagine you're driving a rented Chrysler LeBaron convertible to the perfect family vacation at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills when a rat is tossed into your car by a passing pickup. The rodent in question is not a rat, but a rare blue-tongued mango vole just liberated from the Kingdom by the militant Wildlife Rescue Corps. Welcome to the world of Native Tongue , where dedicated (if somewhat demented) environmentalists battle sleazy real estate developers in the Florida Keys. Hiaasen reminds one of Harry Crews in his depiction of a South full of eccentric people involved in crazy schemes. It is a measure of the writer's talent that no matter how bizarre the situation, it is believable. Late in the book a character laments his predicament as "an irresistible convergence of violence, mayhem and mortality!" If he had added nonstop hilarity, he would have had a perfect description of this book. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/91. - Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, Pa. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his incredibly tolerant family and numerous personal demons.
A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the paper's weekly magazine and later its prize-winning investigations team. Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses. He has outlasted almost all of them, and his column still appears on most Sundays in The Herald's opinion-and-editorial section. It may be viewed online at www.miamiherald.com or in the actual printed edition of the newspaper, which, miraculously, is still being published.
For his journalism and commentary, Hiaasen has received numerous state and national honors, including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. His work has also appeared in many well-known magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Life, Esquire and, most improbably, Gourmet.
In the early 1980s, Hiaasen began writing novels with his good friend and distinguished journalist, the late William D. Montalbano. Together they produced three mystery thrillers -- Powder Burn, Trap Line and Double Whammy -- which borrowed heavily from their own reporting experiences.
Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen's first solo novel. GQ magazine called it "one of the 10 best destination reads of all time," although it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida, as Hiaasen had hoped it might. His next effort, Double Whammy, was the first (and possibly the only) novel about sex, murder and corruption on the professional bass-fishing circuit.
Since then, Hiaasen has published nine others -- Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, The Downhill Lie and Nature Girl. Hiaasen made his children's book debut with Hoot (2002), which was awarded a Newbery Honor and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller lists. For young readers he went on to write the bestselling Flush (2005) and, most recently Scat (January 2009). The film version of Hoot was released in 2006, directed by Wil Shriner and produced by Jimmy Buffett and Frank Marshall. ("Hoot" is now available on DVD).
Hiaasen is also responsible for Team Rodent (1998), a wry but unsparing rant against the Disney empire and its creeping grip on the American entertainment culture. In 2008, Hiaasen came back to nonfiction with The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport. The book chronicles his harrowing and ill-advised reacquaintance with golf after a peaceful, 32-year absence.
Together, Hiaasen's novels have been published in 34 languages, which is 33 more than he is able to read or write. Still, he has reason to believe that all the foreign translations are brilliantly faithful to the original work. The London Observer has called him "America's finest satirical novelist," while Janet Maslin of the New York Times has compared him to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman. Hiaasen re-reads those particular reviews no more than eight or nine times a day.
To prove that he doesn't just make up all the sick stuff in his fiction, Hiaasen has also published two collections of his newspaper columns, Kick A** and Paradise Screwed, both courageously edited by Diane Stevenson and faithfully kept in print by the University Press of Florida.
One of Hiaasen's previous novels, Strip Tease, became a major motion-picture in 1996 starring Demi Moore, and directed by Andrew Bergman. Despite what some critics said, Hiaasen continues to insist that the scene featuring Burt Reynolds slathered from his neck to his toes with Vaseline is one of the high points in modern American cinema.
I picked up Hiassen's "Sick Puppy" at random a couple years back, and then rushed right out and grabbed this one. Nitrous oxide has nothing on these two elevators. I haven't laughed so hard, so continuously, since P.G. Wodehouse ushered me into the presence of the immortal Jeeves thirty years ago.
Hiassen's work seems to divide neatly into the early stuff, up through Skin Tight, which inhabits the same danger-ridden, darkly comic territory as Elmore Leonard, with similarly razor-edged dialogue; and the later stuff, which forms a genre of its own, savagely satirical farces that cast credibility and all sense of human decency and restraint to the winds in order to skewer every form of foible and malefaction. I love them both, but prefer the latter, to which "Native Tongue" squarely belongs. Here the targets range from Sea World to Disney to phone sex purveyors and their clients to fuzzy animal lovers to bodybuilders to birdwatchers. With his usual heaping helpings of lawyers, developers, politicians, and like members of the lower criminal orders. Not least among them, tied like Pauline to the railroad tracks of imminent extinction, those adorable blue-tongued mango voles. And you won't want to miss a single savory chunk of kabob on the master's shish.
I notice that the reviewers all seem to like best the first Hiassen they happened to read, and I'm no exception. This one, "Sick Puppy", and his first entry , "Tourist Season", by me are the champs. But I suspect if you were to ask Carl for his favorite, he'd direct you straight here to his Cage au Voles, because this is the one where he got to lampoon the South Florida theme park - an excrescence so dear to his heart that he made it the subject of "Team Rodent", his only nonfiction volume to date.
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Although I am that rare creature who was born and bred in Florida, you don't have to be a native Floridian to be taken over by Carl Hiaasen's NATIVE TONGUE.
The characters are just too weird to be real and yet, when you think about it, you know you've met people like them, just not quite as overt about it. From the eco-hippie ex-governor of Florida to the guy who meets his dimise in a most unusual aquatic encounter, they will grab you by the throat and won't let go till the last page has been turned.
As for the plot, well, it's got more twists and turns than a sailor's knot and a lot more laughs too.
The really neat trick that Hiaasen pulls on you is that his fiction gives you the sad truth in a way that keeps you from crying. This has to be the funniest book I've ever read.
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Let me start by saying that CH is one of my favorite writers. His stories aren't necessarily epic in nature but his dialog & characterizations & writing in general are virtually beyond reproach. Even though his storylines border on slice-of-life rather than edge-of-your-seat thrillers, Hiaasen's writing is typically so good, his books are still extremely entertaining page-turners.
That said, Native Tongue was quite a letdown for me. Usually I'll finish a book like this in one or two days. I struggled for almost two weeks to finish it, putting it down at the drop of a hat.
In his defense, this was one of Hiaasen's earlier efforts. Everything since Native Tongue has been infinitely better. If you're new to Hiaasen, don't let this book turn you off. His other works are definitely worth reading.
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