Lying (uncharacteristically) by the pool outside my hotel here just after dawn, I am struck by how completely recognisable Miami is through sheer visual aesthetic alone. The blue water, waving palmettos, Art Deco angles and pastel-pink awnings could, perhaps, conceivably be somewhere else, but when you see them all together you think immediately and only of this city, which is, as Didion says, ‘not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical cap...

The first third of Miami seemed to promise nothing more than amusing reportage—when drug traffickers go house-hunting they look for private water access; Tony Montana became a mythic hero almost the instant Scarface premiered—but then it began to hit much harder. Didion is so good that any subject she takes up seems her destined one, the exclusive focus of her brooding brilliance; but reading Miami I was tempted to narrow things down and say she’s truly in her element among covert missions and c...

"Havana vanities come to dust in Miami." - Joan Didion, Miami "The shadowy missions, the secret fundings, the conspiracies beneath conspiracies, the deniable support by parts of the U.S. government and active discouragement by other parts--all these things have fostered a tensely paranoid style in parts of our own political life, Didion suggests.Miami is us, and the tangled tales we heard recently of private armies and retired generals fighting their own lucrative wars provide something of a ret...

Not my favourite Didion (I’d have benefitted from knowing more about the political context in the US from the 60s - late 80s before going in), but even the less good Didion books are still worth a read.

This was a thrift store offer I couldn't refuse; a Joan Didion book I'd never heard of for a nickel. But did I really care to read her impressionistic musings on the city of Miami (as of the mid-1980s, when this was penned) and the complicated influence/history of the Cuban-exile community on it? Maybe not, but Didion hooked me right off the bat.Reading the comments of some others here, I find some predictable grousing about Didion being as a sort of female, white-privileged, racist interloper;

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 Rus...

Joan Didion is a great writer. I don't think "Miami" is a great book, though. "Miami," does a marvelous job of showing how intrigue, double-crosses, and empty promises are the coin of the realm when it comes to both the Washington intelligence establishment and the expat community in Miami who dreamed of a Cuban reconquista by the exiled propertied classes. The problem, for this reader and reviewer, though, was that this note was struck so constantly and redundantly that it became the journalist...

Joan Didion's writing is a touchstone in my life, has been since The White Album. This book suits her style to a T, urgent, riveting, exposing the underbelly. She has the same fascination I have with sordid corruption in politics and circles of power, and Miami is a city rampant with both. The Nicaraguan war was basically run from Miami. That has been established not just in this book, but in many others. The CIA and conservative Cuban exiles who fled Castro teamed up and turned the city into a

Sadly, it's too late for me to grow up to be Joan Didion. She does shit with commas that should be illegal all in fifty states, makes it work, and then stands in tropical humid heat, smoking calmly, without breaking a sweat.If I weren't already dreaming of a move to Miami, this book might have nudged me in that direction. It's not really so much about Miami, per se, but about Cubans there in the eighties. I recommend it, if you're into that sort of thing.

Most of what I know (if not all) about Miami comes from my partner, who grew up in the city as a second generation Colombian American. He recommended this book to me as one of the only books that really captures what he thought and experienced as he grew up and I do admit that this book added a lot of background context to much of what he’s told me about the city and his own lived experiences. A lot of this book is still relevant today: Florida (and particularly Latinx Florida) became a big stor...

A pithy bit of reportage—with a slight twinge of Soapdish/The Sun Also Sets banana-hatted melodrama for fun—that would be, I’m assuming, more interesting to those of us that remember another very weird time in America. Yes, the Time of the Shoulderpads and the Llelo Boys. You didn’t have to be there. Seriously. Missed nothing. Honestly, it’s a miracle what Pacino did with this source material. Coño!

This one took me a while to get into. The narrative, if you will, is non-linear, opaque, and often confusing and contradictory sounding. But that's the point. Didion stirs a tropical cauldron of politics, actions, laments, lies and reversals. The end result is a heat-dream snapshot of a Miami often closer culturally to Cuba than America.

Moments of this were fascinating, but on the whole this book felt so scattered and unfocused that, by the end, when I think I was supposed to be feeling a rising tension, what I actually felt was relief that it was over.

It was a difficult read. But I'm glad I finished it. What Joan Didion did with this book I later discovered is called "new journalism" - that is to say the every dry bits and pieces of information doesn’t find its way on the book, rather the author uses some of the materials in a creative way, not to be confused with coherent, to write her piece. That doesn’t always maintain a sequence of events, which naturally should perplex a lot of readers like myself who are not very grounded on the Cuban-

✰ 2.5 ✰miss didion, this just wasn't the one. firstly, i was misled by the blurb so this wasn't really what i expected it to be. secondly, i feel like miami needed three more rounds of editing. didion's sentences were repetitive and never-ending, with a serial use of commas. the irony of this book is that didion writes about the ignorance towards the spanish language, but the fact the book was inundated with spanish words with no translation meant most the time i had no idea what was going on. i...

Miami makes two consecutive entries in my Year of Books for which it's difficult to separate the story itself from my familiarity with the story's location and settings. I lived in Miami for nearly five years, but never bothered to understand beyond the obvious why it was so unique from any other city I had visited in the continental United States. Enter Miami, by Joan Didion.Didion crafts a vision of Miami from the early '60s through the '80s, a story that weaves the omnipresent yet misundersto...

one of the very best collection of didion's entries about miami, cuba and washington and the political maneuvering that has gone down in the name of democracy and revolution. she begins pre-castro, tracing a history of exiles coming into miami as safety zone, marks kennedy's bay of pigs event(s) as the new wave of exiles, and proceeds in twists and turns, charting the actions anti-castro exiles to reagan's america in the mid-1980's as the 40th president spins fantasies in order to aid the "freed...

"To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance."Manuela passed Miami on to me as she was reading it this Summer when we quarantined together. When I was living in Los Angeles, Joan Didion helped me tune into the history woven through out the city. Being from South Florida and back here now, this book helped me piece together while also expanding my ideas about stories I've heard of growing up, names of places, political tensions that still persist today. This rea...

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 read...

I rarely pick up non fiction books. I don't think it is because I dislike them. I think most of the time, non fiction is a little more bland that a good fiction book. This book, however, was interesting. It follows specific people. Some of the things talked about in this book happened when I was a young child and I have no recollection of these things happening. It was a good read and I found myself wanting to know more about certain things that happened during the time period.

"During the spring when I began visiting Miami all of Florida was reported to be in drought, with dropping water tables and unfilled aquifers and SAVE WATER signs, but drought, in a part of the world which would be in its natural state a shelf of porous oolitic limestone covered most of the year by a shallow sheet flow of fresh water, proved relative. During this drought the city of Coral Gables continued, as it had every night since 1934, to empty and refill its Venetian Pool with fresh unchlor...

I didn’t read Didion’s Miami to necessarily learn anything new. The work was published in 1987; yet Didion is so fluid and illuminating, reading anything of hers is going to provide indelible insight to the craft of writing. “The buildings themselves seemed to swim free against the sky.” Of a trial she writes, “there was flickering all through this presentation of the government’s evidence a certain stubborn irritability, a sense of crossed purposes, crossed wires, of cultures not exactly collid...

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

Didion describes “la lucha”—that group-jihad rage that powers Miami’s Cuban-American exiles—in pre-ideological, almost hormonal or phlegmatic terms. These are people almost literally born to hate. One can see the beginnings of that generations-long hate in the Dawn of the Deplorables here, now.The first half of this book is one of the sharpest accounts of immigration and racism in America. The second half contains some strange-ranger nuggets—like the entire transcript of a conversation between R...

Being born in Miami around the time this book was written, its characters have always blown in and out of consciousness as if on a tropical breeze. Nothing holds fast - not the stories or people - everything moving, slippery, like the tide. Joan Didion was able to mold her journalistic prowess into that rhythm - with prose that move as a fever dream. And I read it just the same - unable to put it down, until all of a sudden it was over in less than 24 hours. Now, not only have I learned somethin...

Although, most of Joan Didion's reporting is focused on the politics of the city, it's still surreal reading this book (written in the late '80s) alongside recent news of the condo collapse. She sort of brushes over developers interest in Miami during the time and how scattershot it was.

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.

Not her best or most straight-forward writing, but it does give clear insight into a unique time and place: Cuban-American Miami in the 80s

Hidden in this New Yorker style book about Cubsn American politics is David Gergen explaining in real time that Ronald Reagan's job was to be a communicator and let the professionals run the country : "He doesn't need to know who's playing tennis on the White House tennis court. The last president (Carter) had an encyclopedic knowledge and look where that got us."

I was raised among Cubans (dated and darn near married a couple) during the period described by Didion, although I was on the other Florida coast (Tampa, and the Cuban community there was a bit different in outlook), and I paid rather close attention to the raucous (destructive) cocaine days and racial discord of that wild city east across the Everglades. Politically Cuban Americans can be an intense people, but personally I have found few as welcoming, generous, boisterous, fun-loving, and warm...