Tom Mathews's Reviews > Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland

I have long been a fan of Dave Barry. Back when I was a young lad pondering what it was that made women so different from us male types I happened upon this cogent observation by Barry, then a columnist for the Miami Herald.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

Wow! How could I not make the source of such wisdom one of my go-to guys when it comes to the subject of, well, just about anything.

So when Barry’s publisher announced that he was going to write the definitive book on Florida aimed at correcting everyone’s misconceptions about the state that gave us Miami Vice and President George W. Bush, my immediate response was, ‘Count me it!’

Starting out with the sober dedication ‘To my fellow Floridians. Don’t ever sober up,’ Barry, a longtime resident of the Sunshine State, described how he has in recent years been receiving an ever-growing number of calls from journalists asking what is wrong with Florida. These calls have even been coming from states such as Indiana, the state with ‘people who cannot explain their nickname’ or even Kentucky, once known ‘for having a statewide total of 23 teeth’. And so, ‘without doing any research’ he set out to figure out why all the other states are now laughing at Florida. His answer was quick in coming. It was the presidential election of 2000, where for day after hellish day the nation’s eyes were focused on Florida’s apparent inability to decide who it voted for until finally the “U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a seven to two decision, that Florida should be given back to Spain.”

This event gave the rest of the nation, and may Floridians including Barry, the impression that Florida was a ‘subtropical festival of stupid’ prompting Barry to search, again without research, for a scientific explanation for Florida’s stupidity. He quickly realized that the answer lies in its climate and geography. The warm climate, with the assistance of Disneyworld, attracts millions of visitors each year to Florida. The smart ones usually find their way home but the stupid visitors, not realizing that Florida is surrounded on three sides by water, frequently find themselves unable to locate the exit, as it were, and end up settling in. As explanations go, I found this pretty plausible.

Of course, not all of the people who move to Florida are stupid and Barry takes pains to explain this phenomenon. His chief explanation is that, while states like California, New York and Illinois pay high taxes for their corrupt and inefficient governments, Floridians can enjoy its corrupt and inefficient government for a lot less money.

The last half of the book actually did require Barry to hit the road and do some research. In this section he travels the state visiting and reporting on all of the wonderful places that make Florida unique. These places include:
Tarpon Springs: The Sponge Capital of the World,
Cassadaga: the Psychic Capital of the World,
And, of course, Gatorland, ‘The Alligator Capital of the World’ and ‘home of the Screamin Gator Zip Line’.
With all of these world capitals, it’s surprising that Florida has any room left for any other attractions but Barry manages to find some. There’s Dave Shealy’s Skunk Ape Research Center, and the Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, home of the World-Famous Weeki Wachee Mermaids .

For those who read this book and decide that Florida is the place to be, Barry also paid a visit to The Villages, ‘the world’s largest retirement community and the fastest growing city in the United States’. If what the stories Barry has heard are true, it is also a place where “you can lead a wild, carefree, and passionate lifestyle, possibly involving sex, even if you are a really, really old person, defined as a person my age.”
After scouring Florida to in search of a smorgasbord of non-Disney-owned attractions to delight and amaze his readers, Barry returned home to Miami to “man up and do something manly”. For him, that could only mean a visit to Lock & Load Miami, south Florida’s ‘premier machine gun experience and state-of-the-art shooting range, offering the nation's greatest variety of fully automatic firearms with over 25 fully automatic machine guns available for use in packages and a la carte,’ (gift certificates available). He hoped that his wife would want to join him on this part of his research but she declined, leaving him to muse that “I am a huge fan of females as a gender, but they tend to display a baffling lack of enthusiasm for violent destruction.” ( I told you Barry’s insights regarding the differences between the sexes are first rate.)

Barry ends up his tour of Florida with a trip to Key West, or at least the fifty some-odd bars that make up the southernmost tip of the eastern seaboard. Fun fact. All but three had musicians hired for their ability to play Jimmy Buffet songs.

Bottom Line: Dave Barry is a master of making the most ordinary scenario hilarious. Take that skill and apply it to a topic that is already strange and you have a book that is guaranteed to entertain. This review is based on the audio recording ably narrated by Dick Hill.

*Quotations are cited from an audio recording and may not be the same as appears in the final published print edition. The review was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher and the fine folks at LibraryThing in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.

FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.