Miami: A Fool's Paradise

Steven Gaines’s social history of Miami Beach titled Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach is an entertaining chronicle of sleaze and vapidity in the Florida tropics, overpopulated by characters straight out of central casting, from gorgeous airheads to slimy swindlers. That’s the story of Florida. As any journalist can attest, just because a place is shallow, corrupt and infested with phonies doesn’t mean it’s dull. In fact, there’s probably not another square mile of American real estate more amusing than South Beach, in small doses and with the proper precautions.

[Carl Hisasen via NYT]

My own two cents is that the soundtrack to Miami has never been written better than by Against Me!