SUNSHINE STATES <i> by Patrick Carr (Doubleday: $19.95; 237 pp.) </i>

Florida, with its infamous drug underworld and mysterious swamplands, is an exotic world to most Americans. How, then, must it appear to a British journalist? “Florida is not normal,” writes Patrick Carr, who, in true British form, approaches America’s southern toe as a frontier. And an untamed world it is, in his eyes. In the physical sense, he feels justified in calling it a frontier: Where else would someone he is personally acquainted with be devoured by an alligator?

As a chronicler of American travels, Carr falls somewhere between Charles Dickens and Crocodile Dundee. Not content to talk to people about the cocaine trade, he goes under cover as a street narc. On a visit to Seminole leader Chairman Billie, he learns the importance of panthers, Florida’s rarest and dearest endangered animal: “Pelicans and pink flamingos are well up there in a dime-store sort of way, and the threatened manatees certainly have their peace-loving-brothers-and-sisters-of-the-ocean appeal, but in terms of sheer scarcity and pure animal magnitude, the panthers are incomparable.” They are, in one of Carr’s many witty phrases, Florida’s “ecosymbol of choice.”

Foreign as this southland may sound, any fellow resident of the Sun Belt will warm to Carr’s paeon to the sun: “The sun shines more in Florida than other places, promoting green subtropical abundance, the casting off of restrictive clothing, the building of swimming pools and ‘Florida rooms’ from which its benevolence can be enjoyed in coolish comfort, the taking of a certain ease, and the overall availability of, well, warm feelings. In a world of trouble, the great dome of a clear blue sky can render the same service as that often ascribed to the realization of imminent death. It can clear the mind most wonderfully.”