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On the Shelf:
Another life
Understanding
Shaggy
"Yuh ketch
cow by im awn, but man by his wud"
Island
reading
On the Disc:
Burning up
Ready like
Preddie
Rhythm
roundup
Ragga massive
On the Page:
"The way
they do things at the 'big schools'"
"She of
course considers herself a connection of ours"
On the Web:
Point-and-click
bacchanal
Redemption
style
Online
ball-by-ball
On the Stage:
Cool island
soul
On the Set
Yo-ho-ho and
quiet on the set
On the Rise:
His way in the
world
Another life
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Carlos Eire (Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-1965-1)
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Growing up in a
wealthy Havana suburb, Carlos and his friends fiendishly hunt lizards (which
they loathe), are enthralled by firecrackers (the bigger and deadlier the
better), wage monumental breadfruit battles, and rampage through a neighbour's
private backyard zoo. Their childish concerns and pleasures play out in a world
of radiant heat and crisp shadows, tangerine sunsets and brilliant blue waves
splashing against the Malecon. The monks at his school tell him Cuba is a
paradise, maybe even the original Paradise, the garden of Eden. "For anyone who
wasn't poor, life could be beautiful, even if it was all balanced on a razor's
edge. As beautiful as a giant turquoise wave poised right over your head."
Then, in January 1959, the wave crashes down and shatters everything. Castro and his rebel army in the eastern hills take Havana; the brutal Batista regime ends overnight, replaced by the brutal regime of the Revolution. Bombs go off across the city. A cousin is arrested and tortured; another relative executed by firing squad. So many of the things that have made Carlos's childhood joyful -chewing gum, movies, Christmas -suddenly disappear. His parents -his father the judge, obsessed with his antique collection, convinced he was Louis XVI of France in a former life, and his mother, certain she was never Marie Antoinette -are divided over what to do with their sons. Eventually Carlos, just 11 years old, leaves for the United States, one of 14,000 Cuban children sent by their terrified parents into what would turn out to be permanent exile.
Forty years later, now a professor at Yale, Carlos Eire set out to recreate in this gorgeous, exuberant, genuinely heartbreaking memoir the lost world of his childhood, a time and place made magically unreal by the events of history. The lady in the painting on the wall appears in his dreams, abusing him in the foulest possible language; sharks circle at the b. . .
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