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miami ❤️
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Miami
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Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence, f rom the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean.
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island ninety miles to the south.
As Didion follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in.
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island ninety miles to the south.
As Didion follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,1987
This edition
- Format
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240 pages, Paperback
- Published
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September 29, 1998 by Vintage
- ISBN
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- ASIN
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- Language
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English
About the author
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Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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This was really a great read. An analysis of the Cuban American diaspora and the crime and terrorism that it inspired. The secret origin of Dan Quayle as a Iran Contra player after his tenure in congress leading to his shoe in for vice president.
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This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever lived or wants to live in Miami, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about my hometown during the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s! Didion writes this nonfiction essay collection about Miami in such a perceptive and nuanced way, which is super impressive for her as an outsider to Miami culture but it also allows her to see it in a clear way. She writes truthfully and curiously about what is now a historical Miami (but of course the echoes are still very palpable today). She spends a lot of time describing the relationship between Cuba and Miami (logically) and the resulting cultural & linguistic emergence as well as events like the Bay of Pigs invasion and Mariel Boatlift. She talks about Miami in the context of the Cold War, in the context of race relations, and generally you can get a sense of the special place Miami has had in American and world history. I loved getting to know my hometown better, and better recognizing just how unique it is – especially as I read this in my first weeks back after my time in Paris. I appreciate Didion’s tone and sincerity as she describes the good, the bad and the ugly.
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Joan Didion's, "Miami," is an intriguing story that chronicles the time between the 'Bay of Pigs,' and straight into the Reagan administration. In many way it is a sociological study of the different Cuban exile groups in Miami and the different approaches they took in the hope of overthrowing Castro. Of special interest, was how some exile groups did not really believe that the United States was their ally in this fight. They believed that the Kennedy administration had made a deal with the Russians that literally tied the American hands.
The latter part of this book deals with the unrest in Central America during the Reagan administration, and the different stories circulating out of Washington and Miami about the approaches being used to liberate the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I must admit I found the last twenty pages of this book very difficult to follow. It was like reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but the rest of the book was truly stimulating and made incisive statements about Miami during this time that I had no idea about.
The latter part of this book deals with the unrest in Central America during the Reagan administration, and the different stories circulating out of Washington and Miami about the approaches being used to liberate the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I must admit I found the last twenty pages of this book very difficult to follow. It was like reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but the rest of the book was truly stimulating and made incisive statements about Miami during this time that I had no idea about.
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EXTREMELY detailed and observant. perfectly described the weirdness and conflicting nature of miami
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WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MIAMI PLEASE BRING THE FLAG
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Super interesting subject but either it’s too dense or I am
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I wish I could have given this book 5 stars as the first half was equally heartfelt as it was relatable — having grown up in the city. Not being Cuban, I was always an outsider, and immediately understood Didion’s perspective as she positions herself as a “voyeur” of sorts. It losses a star as the second half is repetitive in explaining the Cuban rhetoric and thought of the time.
It does not take her years of reporting in Miami to identify that the city’s “democratic institutions seemed rooted if it all, only shallowly,” that “nothing about Miami was fixed or hard,” that there were too many public works projects that were faulty at best, that being Hispanic here only “meant mostly Cuban,” “Cubans in the clubs did not admit Jews or blacks,” that there was money to “spend and a notable willingness to spend it in public,” “yet another gala,” “all high visibility,” that “Miami Anglos and Miami Cubans were failing to connect,” and that Spanish was spoken everywhere by default. It’s a city with an overwhelming amount of paradoxes; most notably being diverse but only in the most Hispanic sense, being a free land but to some a place of betrayal, openness of displaying passion but disallowing protests when not done in the right way, and pushing away newcomers despite their own circumstances of flee. All in all, Didion did her duty in describing Miami’s society at odds with what it was battling from the Bay of Pigs to the Watergate break-in. A look into a place of passion and hypocrisy.
It does not take her years of reporting in Miami to identify that the city’s “democratic institutions seemed rooted if it all, only shallowly,” that “nothing about Miami was fixed or hard,” that there were too many public works projects that were faulty at best, that being Hispanic here only “meant mostly Cuban,” “Cubans in the clubs did not admit Jews or blacks,” that there was money to “spend and a notable willingness to spend it in public,” “yet another gala,” “all high visibility,” that “Miami Anglos and Miami Cubans were failing to connect,” and that Spanish was spoken everywhere by default. It’s a city with an overwhelming amount of paradoxes; most notably being diverse but only in the most Hispanic sense, being a free land but to some a place of betrayal, openness of displaying passion but disallowing protests when not done in the right way, and pushing away newcomers despite their own circumstances of flee. All in all, Didion did her duty in describing Miami’s society at odds with what it was battling from the Bay of Pigs to the Watergate break-in. A look into a place of passion and hypocrisy.
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