I spent much of the weekend reading Carlos Eire's interesting Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy. Eire arrived in the U.S. in 1962 as part of the Pedro Pan airlift. He thought the name extremely inappropriate; Peter Pan was a boy who wouldn't grow up, while the operation signaled the end of his childhood, and that of the 14,000 other children.
Murder on the Beach, the mystery bookstore in Delray Beach, is reopening on Monday. I'm thinking of going and, instead of a mask, wearing a nylon stocking over my head.
Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, in which the 19th Century English writer visits Cairo during the plague, and Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room.
I haven’t read American Dirt – I read Paul Theroux’s empathetic (and true) On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – but it seems to me that when we start telling authors what they can and cannot write about we’ve entered the old world of the Soviet Union.
For years I was told that travel books were a tough sell. Now I’m being told that memoirs are a tough sell. I could write about a beagle that survived Auschwitz and I’d be told that books about dogs and books about the Holocaust are a tough sell.
Yesterday at the Miami Book Fair I listened to an impassioned defense of immigrants from Suketu Mehta and then heard two Florida poets – English professor David Kirby and cattle rancher Sean Sexton – deal with truth and beauty.