- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (24 Mar 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297793187
- ISBN-13: 978-0297793182
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.3 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Joan Didion's Miami is at once an aggressively real city and a legendary domain to which Swift might well have posted Gulliver, or Voltaire Candide. In this book Didion the novelist and Didion the moralist work hand in hand to create a work that combines intense imaginative vision with extraordinary argumentative force. In her exact, rational and appalled portrayal, Miami is the price that America is paying for the corrupted language in which it conducts its political business."
JONATHAN RABAN, 'Observer'
"By the time one has finished this unflinching and acute book, ostensibly journalism but containing all the intrigue of a thriller, one is oneself on edge."
FRANCES SPALDING, 'TES'
"Her book may be seen by many as recording the defeat of the American system."
CAL McCRYSTAL, 'Sunday Times'
"I doubt I'll read prose any more beautiful than this in the next year… the writing and its message scorch like dry ice."
JOHN GILL, 'Time Out'
"Miami the place is, to Didion's mind, the most interesting city in the US. 'Miami' the book is, to my mind, nothing short of brilliant."
LOUISE BERNIKOW, 'Cosmopolitan'
"No one depicts place or passion or dislocation with more accuracy; no one can move us more deeply with the staccato repetition of the crazy facts of personal-political life than Joan Didion."
NEW STATESMAN
Brighton Evening Argus
‘One of the greatest works in the genre’
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Joan Didion's book is a guide not only to the politics and culture of Miami in the 1980s, but also to the wider currents of American political life in that decade. It is well written, very easy to read and surprisingly gripping given that in a sense it is a work of current affairs about a period that is now 20 years behind us.
The writing is clear yet evocative, the book is well structured building over its course to provide a real feel for the city and its people (particularly on the interaction of the Anglo-Americans and Cuban-Americans) and works well to show how the history of one time and place reflects on the wider history of which it forms part.
This is not a light hearted book, it is very easy to read but it is in large part a tale of corruption, grimy politics and the social currents that can hide just out of sight of the gaze of the the casual tourist. It gives a tremendous insight into a fascinating city, but it doesn't tempt you to move there and I doubt the Miami tourist board are as taken by it as I am.
This is part of a Granta series of reissued great works of reportage, having read it I can see why Granta considered it worth republishing and why it is so highly regarded as a piece of high quality journalistic writing.
Format:Paperback
I bought this as I have liked Didion's writing and I am interested in the Cuban Revolution.
The book is a collection of snapshots of Cuban emigre life in Miami,which is dispassionate enough to appear objective,although the writer's sympathies are evident.
The style in places is clumsy and disappointing,the chief culprit being rambling sentences with endless sub-clauses which are difficult to follow.
Additionally,some of this is overwritten,adding to the effort required.
This defect is not, however, ubiquitous,and Didion's more typical phrasing,a perspicacious yet languid cynicism,illuminates enough of the events examined to make it a very interesting read.
Real history is the hero of the book,a terrible story of treachery and violence by very bad men,another view of the America which Didion has tellingly portrayed in her other works.
The book is a collection of snapshots of Cuban emigre life in Miami,which is dispassionate enough to appear objective,although the writer's sympathies are evident.
The style in places is clumsy and disappointing,the chief culprit being rambling sentences with endless sub-clauses which are difficult to follow.
Additionally,some of this is overwritten,adding to the effort required.
This defect is not, however, ubiquitous,and Didion's more typical phrasing,a perspicacious yet languid cynicism,illuminates enough of the events examined to make it a very interesting read.
Real history is the hero of the book,a terrible story of treachery and violence by very bad men,another view of the America which Didion has tellingly portrayed in her other works.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
"...the Waking Dream that is Miami"
17 April 2001
Format:Paperback
I've got a bone to pick with Joan Didion, but first let me say that "Miami" is a simply brilliant piece of noir journalism that, in every paragraph, reflects a different aspect of "the Capital of Latin America." Odd that 1987 saw three major non-fiction Miami treatments, all differently motivated: David Rieff's "Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America," T.D. Allman's "Miami: City of the Future," and Didion's book. Yeah, yeah, at the time, Miami was hot hot hot, Crockett and Tubbs were in the middle of their run, but...Iran-Contragate was also playing itself out, and Miami was an epicenter of Reagan-era, better-dead-than-Red, Contra War intrigue. Didion captures the period beautifully in suitably ominous, conspiratorial tones. She introduces us to a cast of chilling characters--no, wait: she means for us to UNDERSTAND her characters as the driven, chilling, formidable products of "el exilio" and "la lucha"--and leaves no doubt that these are serious men, men who "get things done," men capable of, well, anything.
And my bone? Didion is a wonderful writer who cannot, however, resist long, convoluted, patience-trying Germanic sentences, frontloaded with the universe, embellishing adjective after adjective, wending their way down the page, forestalling all gratification, clarity, or meaning, until finally hitting us between the eyes with the final word-punchline, which invariably leads our eyes to course back up the page in an effort to reconstruct, to rediscover "just where were we going with this." Small price to pay for so delicious a book.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
A Story Perhaps Only a Novelist Can Tell Well
27 Sep 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The story of the Cuban exiles in Miami deserves to be told with drama and passion because that is what it has been. In this page-turner, Joan Didion captures the rejection and racism that the Cuban exiles first encountered in Miami when they emigrated from Cuba after Castro assumed power. She shows how some of the Cubans became successful businesspersons, political powerbrokers, shapers of local culture, renowned humanitarians and philanthropists, expert propagandists, able diplomats, drug runners, muggers, and internationally renowned terrorists.
We see the close relationship the Cuban exiles formed with the USA government, especially its clandestine agencies. We learn that in the 1960s Miami essentially became a CIA recruiting and operational-staging center. Didion tells us that the CIA had as much as 120,000 "regular agents" (full and part-time) stationed in south Florida. It had a flotilla of small boats (often used for terrorist raids on Cuba), making it the third largest navy in the western hemisphere at the time. It owned airline companies in the Miami area and holding companies that lent itself loans for covert operations. "There were [also] hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbors" as well as "fifty five other front businesses" and "CIA boat shops," "guns shops," real-estate, travel and detective agencies (pp. 90-91).
Yet the relationship between the Cuban Americans and the USA has been a troubled one. Although the Cuban Americans find themselves dependent on the USA for maintaining their struggle against Castro, they also don't trust the government, blaming it for their loss at the Bay of Pigs and for adopting policies soft on Castro. Likewise, the USA finds some Cuban Americans helpful in its secret foreign adventures (Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.) as well as a nuisance when these terrorist elements assassinate foreign diplomats, blow up airplanes and banks, and murder USA citizens.
Particularly poignant is Didion's description of the Cuban Americans' personal and often internecine struggle over understanding themselves as immigrants or exiles. These struggles have resulted in broken friendships, shunning, public ridicule, financial loss, bodily harm and death.
The book only covers Miami until 1987. I wish Didion would update the book, although it might be dangerous for her to do so.
This is a great read and well worth the purchase.
We see the close relationship the Cuban exiles formed with the USA government, especially its clandestine agencies. We learn that in the 1960s Miami essentially became a CIA recruiting and operational-staging center. Didion tells us that the CIA had as much as 120,000 "regular agents" (full and part-time) stationed in south Florida. It had a flotilla of small boats (often used for terrorist raids on Cuba), making it the third largest navy in the western hemisphere at the time. It owned airline companies in the Miami area and holding companies that lent itself loans for covert operations. "There were [also] hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbors" as well as "fifty five other front businesses" and "CIA boat shops," "guns shops," real-estate, travel and detective agencies (pp. 90-91).
Yet the relationship between the Cuban Americans and the USA has been a troubled one. Although the Cuban Americans find themselves dependent on the USA for maintaining their struggle against Castro, they also don't trust the government, blaming it for their loss at the Bay of Pigs and for adopting policies soft on Castro. Likewise, the USA finds some Cuban Americans helpful in its secret foreign adventures (Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.) as well as a nuisance when these terrorist elements assassinate foreign diplomats, blow up airplanes and banks, and murder USA citizens.
Particularly poignant is Didion's description of the Cuban Americans' personal and often internecine struggle over understanding themselves as immigrants or exiles. These struggles have resulted in broken friendships, shunning, public ridicule, financial loss, bodily harm and death.
The book only covers Miami until 1987. I wish Didion would update the book, although it might be dangerous for her to do so.
This is a great read and well worth the purchase.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Excellent perspective on Miami
7 Mar 2002
Format:Paperback
I read this book so many years ago, but I just now realized I had never shared my opnions about it. I had lived in Miami for about eight years, and I think I was in my 5th year or so when I finally heard about "Miami" by Joan Didion. It was only after I had finally moved to the Beach that I happened upon it, at Kafka's. At any rate, it is an excellent book. I think about it every time I hear on the news about the bumbling CIA or news of Castro makes the NYTimes. Incidentally, 1987 also saw the publication of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," by Edna Buchanan, another equally excellent non-fiction book about this city. I also highly recommend "A Book of Common Prayer" by Ms. Didion.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
