For all those who care about Florida.

You just cover a lot of territory and you do it aggressively and you do it fairly and you don't play favorites and you don't take any prisoners. It's the old school of slash-and-burn metropolitan column writing. You just kick ass. That's what you do. And that's what they pay you to do.

—Carl Hiaasen

Since 1985, Carl Hiaasen has written some 1,300 columns for the Miami Herald, all of which I've been privileged to read as a single body of work, though choosing among them to create an anthology of reasonable length meant eliminating far more than I would have wished. While many great columns had to be omitted because of limited space, those gathered here represent some of Hiaasen's finest writing as an advocate for realistic growth and decent government in Florida. Taken as a whole, this collection constitutes a history of sorts, chronicling a decade and a half of the issues, struggles, and personalities affecting the development of the state and the welfare of its residents. Individually, each column provides the distinct pleasures associated with reading Carl Hiaasen—inspired outrage, hilarity, incredulity, and passion—in language brilliantly wielded against two targets in particular: hypocrisy and greed.

While fans nationwide can find his novels anywhere, Hiaasen's biweekly columns have thus far been essentially inaccessible after their appearance in the Herald or one of the other papers through which his work is syndicated. Even ardent fans would find it difficult to search archives for past columns, especially those from five or ten years ago. This anthology was therefore originally intended to answer the need for a more permanent record of Hiaasen's career as one of the country's most influential and articulate journalists. But what also emerges from the collection, most significantly for those of us who care about Florida's future, is a clear picture of Carl Hiaasen's continuing role as an uncompromising and eloquent defender of this state.