David Rieff has become our most dazzling chronicler of change. In Going to Miami and Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, he took us into the streets of the new American city, where waves of recent immigrants are transforming the terrain and creating new patterns of urban life. Rieff's book on Los Angeles, Joan Didion said, was "a disturbing and brilliant examination of the America we have not faced."Rieff's portrait of South Florida's Cubans, torn between the imagined Eden of their home and their success in America, captures their bittersweet experience. He unmasks their fractured, refracted identities: exiled since Castro's rise in 1959 in a foreign city less than two hundred miles from their home, separated from the comforts of the familiar, from homes remembered and imagined, but unable to resist America's still-overwhelming attraction, they have transformed Miami from a tourist town to the paradigm of the twenty-first-century American metropolis.Through the experiences of some unforgettable people; through street scenes, cafes, and clubs; through a trip with two Miami Cubans visiting Havana for the first time; Rieff has assembled a remarkable portrait of a people and place and a haunting psychological profile of our century's most emblematic - and influential - figure: the exile. Read Less