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...

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 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

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.

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-

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...

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.

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.

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...

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

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...

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...

I really enjoyed this book, which was nothing if not well researched and structured. I appreciated how Didion started small, with the city itself, and grew the book outward, to encompass not just Cuba but other Central and South American countries, as well as other American cities, especially Washington. Her picture of interconnectedness was fabulous, and her diction also great. She used a great deal of repetition in both word and phrase, which I appreciated, as she I'd it when the emphasis was

Didion continues to be my favorite non-fiction author. The precision of her language matches the precision of her analysis, whether she's describing on the micro scale of how minute gestures of an interviewee reveal their worldview, or the macro scale of Washington politics in the Reagan era. Here (circa '87) she's plumbing the gulf between Miami's Cuban and Anglo populations, and the complicated relation of Cuban anti-Castro militants to Washington, "la lucha" (the struggle) and each other. Man...

It seems like it's cheating to rate a book when I didn't actually finish it, but I read about 75% of it. I really enjoyed the first few chapters that were a bit more sociological about North America's only truly Latin American city (for instance, in 1987, only 23% of the population in Miami spoke English as a first language), but it soon began delving into so much of the history of American-Cuban relations that I just got lost. I tried very hard to keep up, but after 100 pages or so of what basi...

Miami has been a place that has intrigued me since the days of Miami Vice. Recent shows set there include Burn Notice and Dexter. And it is also the setting of the Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley novels. Joan Didion took a look at the city in the late 80s and then wrote Miami (1987). It is a fascinating look at the city, but mostly through the Cuban exile politics that have taken place there, where John F. Kennedy was the second most hated man after Fidel Castro. So it goes from the effects of

This book hasn’t stood the test of time in my view. Perhaps if I was American I would be feeling somewhat differently, but even so I suspect I’d find this particular book of her not a book but rather a piece of extended reportage made into a book, and reprinted more recently because Didion is not just famous but a legend. I was interested to a certain extent to learn about Cuban exiles in Miami but the amount of intricate details and interviews fast became irrelevant. At first I decided to perse...

Further intrigued by Joan Didion after we read a chunk from "Miami" in a journalism course I took junior year called Interpretive Writing. Going back, I consider it a somewhat uneven piece compared with the rest of her work, but it's worth studying. She's out of her elements (California; New York), but that's also what makes it interesting. If I had not discovered "The White Album" a year and a half later, I might not have paid much attention to Joan Didion after this, which seems unthinkable no...

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.

One long piece of reporting non-fiction on Miami in the 70s and 80s, focusing on the situation of exile Cubans.Some notes:- it's striking how similar the divide between US Americans and Cuban immigrants is to all other migrant divides - you could replace 'Cubans' by 'Turks' and set the whole thing in Germany and it would work mostly equally well (except for that whole revolution and bay of pigs thing)They spoke of "diversity", and of Miami's "hispanic flavor," and approach in which 56 percent of...

One of the best books written about Miami. She nails The Miami Herald and the Cuban community.

When one is in the hands of such a capable reporter and writer of sparkling prose that Joan Didion is, one expects to be entertained and informed about the subject that she is treating. And so it goes with Joan Didion's masterpiece of 1987, entitled "Miami." Opening as a traditional bit of reporting on Miami in the 1980s, Didion's book here treats the Liberty City riots, the changing demographics of the city after Castro's revolution, and the social norms of the 56% of the population that is His...

I watched Joan Didion's May 7th, 2000 " In Depth" interview with Connie Brod on Book TV.org, last night, an interview that I had seen as it occurred. I wanted to see her comments regarding her book, " Miami", along with her responses then to the many call in questions of her multiple books. This book , "Miami" was copywritten in 1987. When asked why she had written this book, her reply was" I thought America's future was on the Southern border, the interface with the Caribbean , with Latin Amer

Reading anything by Joan Didion is a lot like going through someone's medicine cabinet. One gets the most intimate details through the most mundane things. Didion's "Miami" is a series of political vignettes and observations describing the Cuban/American relations that shaped the landscapes of Miami switching between historical moments and luncheons that Didion attends. Listing off dress styles, lipsticks, sounds of taffeta and newspaper articles Didion gives her take on Miami - not quite a jour...

This book is part travelogue, part sociological study of the subcultures that make Miami "Miami," but primarily a study of the Cubans in exile, post Castro, in Miami. The snippets of news, Didion's first hand reporting, and her incorporation of revelations from public documents, draw a straight line of Cuban exile involvement in CIA plots and White House schemes: from the broken promises of the Bay of Pigs, through the Kennedy Assassination, on through the Watergate break-in, then the Church Com...

I got about halfway through this book before losing interest. I still think it would be worthwhile to finish it, but the pages were getting bogged down for me. In particular, when dates and names start to dominate the page, I wonder why I need to know all this. The ins-and-outs of the CIA's involvement with el exilio are only interesting up to a point.The book shines best when it tackles of the social and cultural aspects of life in Miami in the 80's. Didion captures well the mutual misunderstan...

Didion researched and wrote this Dade dissertation when I myself was spending my college years at the University of Miami. She points out that Anglo residents in Miami were more or less oblivious to the impact that Cuban exiles were having, despite the fact that in 1986 Hispanics (largely Cuban) made up 53% of the city's population. Come to think of it, in the four years I spent down there in the 80's I never once visited a Cuban eatery. We budding undergraduate sophisticates mostly frequented a...

This is not a detailed review but rather one established thought that I think sets Didion's work out in the realm of non-fiction. Where most writers tend to think of their subject as an encapsulation of one larger theme or idea, what I appreciate about Didion is that she elaborates (and maybe obfuscates) her theme by drawing in so many peripheral details. In so many attempts to summarise a movement or era the author will use a few big events as proof of its importance; Didion is frequently muddy...