I believe that Brian Antoni is a very talented writer, which made it harder for me to understand why he had to resort (no pun intended) to such excessive, decadent, revolting sex scenes. So many parts per billion would have more than sufficed. I know this book is a work of fiction, and the current Freeport has many problems. However, I too was raised in Freeport, and I just want people to know that the ORIGINAL Freeport was the closest thing to the lost city of Atlantis, and is now lost to all but a few old Freeporters - Bahamiams, Europeans, Canadians, Orientals, Aussies, Trinidadians, Americans, etc. who carry it in their memories. We were privileged to be part of the dream that was Freeport. And one of the heroes of Freeport was Brian's father, Dr. Robert Antoni. / / / / / B. Copeland

If you like Jay McInerney ("Bright Lights Big City", or my favourite "Story of My Life",) you'll love this book! It's brain candy to be sure, but there is enough tragedy to give a genuine depth to the book. I've spent a lot of time in Freeport, Bahamas and found the fictional history of Grand Bahama Island amusing, but a lot of the descriptions of life in Freeport are completely true! Give it a try, you just might like it!

In this delicate age of political correctness, Mr. Antoni blows the roof off propriety with a tale of decadence that is both a harrowing moralistic fable of cross addictions and a heart-breaaking chronical of trying to find redemption through love and a personal epiphany through the haze of sex and suffering. Antoni's prose rings with a contemporary earnestness that sometime boarders on the scatological, heightening the intensity of this powerful story. Anyone with the deligence to open themselves to some true heartbreak will be rewarded with the privilege of reading one of the most powerful debuts to hit the bookshelves in a long time.

What a SUCK-FEST! This is the worst book I've read in a long time. The (unlucky) 13 authors seem only slightly concerned with plot continuity, and the result is like a novel with every third page torn out. Characters come and go, and come back again for no apparent reason, other than to satisfy the authors' self-indulgent egos. In particular, the chapters by Elmore Leonard and Vicki Hendricks were appallingly bad. Hendricks ignores all the preceeding chapters and suddenly changes the eponymous manatee from an aquatic pinhead into some amalgam of Lassie and the Hardy Boys. In a later chapter Carl Hiaasen openly mocks this sudden swerve in character. (Tip: avoid books where one co-author ridicules another co-author's writing) Elmore Leonard contributes a time capsule that might have been hip 25 years ago, with a black character refering to someone as a "cat", and in the very next sentence actually using the phase "shuck and jive". I am very happy I checked this book out of the library, instead of squandering 22.95 on this train wreck of a book

OK, thirteen of Miami's favorite writers are sitting around a campfire (this isn't a joke). Dave Barry kicks off a story involving a couple hit men, a manatee, a 102-year-old woman and a box containing the head of Fidel Castro, and passes it to the writer to the left. The next eleven writers circle the story around the campfire in an attempt to blend this motley cast of characters (and heads) into the literary equivalent of a refreshing Miami Beach smoothee.

Throwing in monkey wrenches, stranger characters and even more heads-in-boxes in the process, they mostly succeed in creating a wholly unbelievable, extremely offbeat and wildly entertaining mystery. Poor Carl Hiassen (of Striptease fame) is challenged with tying up all the loose ends without playing the Demi Moore card, and succeeds in delivering an ending as strange as a manatee is large.

Above all an interesting experiment, Naked Came the Manatee is also an entertaining quick read.

Booger is the answer to the walls talking. Suspend belief and enter the world of a manatee that thinks, feels and reasons like us. He becomes involved in a mystery not as a victim, but as a participant in important events. The concept of a manatee detective aiding the likes of Brit Montero in solving the case of the Castro heads is only exceeded by the writing of this by the many different writers, from Dave Barry to Carl Hiaasen. No mystery should be this much fun