Miami

"Havana vanities come to dust in Miami," writes Joan Didion at the start of Miami, a book that looks beyond the city's bright pastel facades and sunlit beaches to shadowed scenes, dark history. Didion trains her penetrating vision on Miami's Cuban exile community during the 1980s, dissecting their hopes and fierce politics, their undying commitment to Castro's overthrow, and their tangled dynamic with successive American administrations since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Miami uncovers a world of "violence, intrigue, vengeance, political manipulation, and broken dreams," wrote The Boston Globe upon its 1987 release. In framing her story, Didion offers a hauntingly detailed portrait of the city at a time of booming cocaine-trafficking, racial strife, and skyrocketing murder rates. She also reaches back to the botched 1961 invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the Watergate break-in, setting forth a disturbing history of America's foreign policy, especially its Latin America policy, during the Cold War. Download this first-ever e-book edition of Miami and let Joan Didion, working in prose the Los Angeles Times called "masterful," take you back to this south Florida city in an era of power plays, assassinations, and explosive political passions.