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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.