Cheap Miami (Book) (JOAN DIDION) Price

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Customer Reviews of Miami

Excellent perspective on Miami
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.

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"...the Waking Dream that is Miami"
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.

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Hits the Nail on the Head
As a 23 year resident in Miami (from NYC) I was astonished at Didion's eloquent articulation of what I haven't been able to describe but have pondered over these many years--the cultural and cognitive disconnect between native Americans and disgruntled Cuban exiles. They talk about LA, but Miami really is Never-Never Land with impossibly obdurant and involuntary immigrants who have no clue or stake in the American values of reasoned discourse, free speech, and fair play and no desire to abandon the cultural attributes that have allowed them to suffer under one form of tyranny or another for a long long time. This books explains what they are thinking--the Cubans--and why they behave the way they do. Well-researched, accurate, and beautifully crafted prose.