I can't help thinking of Hiaasen here. I burned out on him some time ago, but in those five or six books of his I did read, he seemed quite effective at pushing his anti-development, particularly anti-Disney message without resorting to lecturing.
That said, I'm with James. McGee's lectures never really bothered me. I read the McGee books when I was in college and loved them, passed them on to my roommate and girlfriend and they both loved them. We even stopped by to see McGee's slip on a spring break trip to Florida. I've never reread any of them, though (unless you count the two
Mark
> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> From: moorich@aol.com
> Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:25:11 +0000
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: John D.
>
> I completely agree. It is not the inclusion of opinion but how artfully it is done. In thinking back, I agreed with several themes JDM harped on--who isn't against greedy land developers raping the environment and/or building shoddy buildings that will collapse with the first hard blow. But my gosh, in the later McGees, the story stopped while the lecture went on for page after page.
>
> Now JDM was good in using his MBA saavy on corporate schenanigans and working them into the plot. As I recall several of the non-McGees, he managed to drive a message home through the plotline and the characters. That beats the heck out of some mouthpiece economist sitting on the back of a boat and running his mouth for page after page.
>
> Mike Hammer had plenty of political views I disagree with but they didn't bother me either. It was an understandable and natural part of the character.
>
> Richard Moore
>
> --- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "tomarmstrongmusic" <tom@...> wrote:
> >
> > In the case of "One Monday..." (which is not a McGee book), yeah I did actually agree with a lot of the points of the digressions that the narrator & his co-workers would go off on. The actual content of the speeches was often interesting & well-thought-out and well-said.
> >
> > They still bugged the crap out of me, though. They pulled me out of the story. The first person character narrator was named Fenn; it was like all of a sudden, Fenn stopped talking to me, and John D is just borrowing his voice to say what he wants to say, not what Fenn would actually say, and then when the speech is over Fenn comes back and talks like himself again.
>
>
>
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