Scan barcode
macroscopicentric's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This is not a 101 book. Didion expects you to come in having a background understanding in Miami, southern Florida, and Cuba's history already, and then builds on those to create a series of impressions. Out of the Didion I've read so far, this is the book that reminded me most of Hunter S. Thompson's work, in that it's writing about the experiences she had while interviewing and researching for stories and not about the stories themselves. I had to pause early on and do some extensive Wikipedia'ing just to know anything Didion casually references. Even with the context, though, this is a book that surfs on vibes and impressions. You won't walk away well-informed but you will definitely walk away amused (or maybe bemused).
smarie_03's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Kind of hard to rate because I feel like this book is the kind of thing you’d mainly appreciate if you’re already from Miami so you have some familiarity with the names and locations as well as some cultural context. Overall, Didion paints a fair portrait of the political issues surrounding the Cuban diaspora in Miami and ties it to larger events in Latin American foreign policy taking place in Washington DC. Super interesting if those subjects pique your interest but I don't think I'd recommend this to anyone for their first Didion book.
caroparr's review against another edition
4.0
How to do justice to Didion's quietly damning look at the fraught relationships between Miami and Cuba? I won't even try, except to say that Ada Ferrer was right to say that to understand Cuba you have to understand Miami. Yes, Didion's sentence structure can drive me crazy at times, but it's all worth it for her sharp eye and even sharper tongue. Published in the mid-eighties, so of course a lot has changed, but this still holds up.
clarkness's review against another edition
4.0
A really well written and insightful investigation into the Cuban exile community in Miami from the 80s. You get a real sense for how the US government used this community for its own ends, but also lost control of it many times over. Ultimately I thought the book started strong, but began to repeat itself towards the end.
shelasher's review against another edition
3.75
I am a huge fan of Joan and have been for a long time. I picked this book up for my Miami book club and decided I have mixed feelings on it. It started off with a bang, I quickly feel in love with Didion's prose and outsider observations of the city. The first 1/3 of the book felt like a poem or love letter about my city. I found myself annotating and highlighting the book (something I rarely do) and was enthralled by the way she described some of my everyday emotions and feelings about Miami.
As the book progressed, I felt she was less eloquent in her prose and it became a bit more of an info dump, while I still think it is really interesting, I was less in love with the book at the end as I was at the beginning.
Overall, Didion does what she does best. She has a knack for viewing her world from a unique perspective and succinctly analyzing the environment and cultural causes of circumstances. Didion does an excellent job of digging into the underbelly of the city and pointing out some of the less flattering history that makes Miami what it is today. It's obvious once you know, but many of these things are not what we think about daily. It was also refreshing to read about a history of Miami that does not involve the Cocaine Cowboys.
I think time has not been supportive of this book, written in the 80s Didion made some assumptions about the readers knowledge base. Which now almost 40 years later, some of that is lost with many readers.
I would recommend this book to everyone who lives in Miami or is curious about the role it has played in American politics in the 80s. As always Didion has beautiful prose and I am happy I read it but it's not her strongest work.
loridawriter's review against another edition
3.0
Wow! So as the white Anglo Saxon perspective of a city that successfully blends two cultures it's no surprise to find racism disguised behind the mask of a liberal. What, there are people who don't speak English or agree with my politics, what is America coming to? Didion, who has never lived in South Florida, has written an embarrassing book that will look worse as time passes and America becomes multicultural. At first, this book was extremely addictive and the history aspect of it had me reading chapter after chapter in one sitting. By the end of the book, I was disgusted and wanted to throw it away.