Book Review

By Derryll White

Dorsey, Tim (2000).  Hammerhead Ranch Motel.

    “Let us consider that we are all partially insane.  It will explain us to each other.”  -Mark Twain

Florida brings out the zany in writers.  It has all the modern sins writ large – sex, dope, racism, corruption.  Tim Dorsey embraces it all, populates it with crazy characters and entertains the readers immensely.

Hammerhead Ranch Motel reads like Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, but not nearly as good.  There are too many cameos, unlinked instances of individual craziness, to make the book a coherent read.  Each is funny and sad in its own way, but they don’t make a whole.

Dorsey does convey the feeling that Florida is completely off the rails and fair game for every governmental and private con known to man.  But there are other writers, such as Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard who do a much better job.

So although funny and sometimes entertaining, Hammerhead Ranch Motel is not a book for the discriminating reader.

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Excerpts from the novel:

FLORIDA – Florida’s beauty creates the illusion of civilization.  It is a thin but functional veneer, like fake-wood contact paper stuck to as flimsy particle board.  Glistening contrails, palm trees down the median, corkscrew water slides and waiting lines of retirees spilling onto the restaurant sidewalks at 4 p.m., hoping for a shot at an early-bird $3.95 Sterno tray of Swedish meatballs.  Spring training, mermaids, trained whales.

FLORIDA’S WEALTH DISTRIBUTION – Every fall the storm season washed the beach at Beverly Shores out to sea, and every spring the Army Corps of Engineers sent in barges to dredge sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pump it back to shore.  It cost millions of dollars and, coupled with their federally subsidized flood insurance, made the residents of Beverly Shores the biggest welfare recipients in the state.  All the government required in return, to legitimize spending tax dollars on beach restoration, was public access to the already public beach.

    It was an outrage.

A FLORIDIAN – … her father was Jebediah “Jeb (“Bo”) Praline, fifth-generation Jim Beam and global knowledge was viewed in their home as a new strain of syphilis that the line of Praline men had yet to build up a natural resistance against.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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