N.M.'s review
MiMo: Miami Modern Revealed by Eric P. Nash
This book brings up an interesting question...what do you want from a reference book?
MIMO really tries to be well-written...arty even...but that's distracting in a book like this.
I need the information for my new book, so I'd like more meat than a rat-pack homage that actually could have been set in ANY hotel in Miami beach, as the boys moved from one place to another.
And..if you're going to try to approach the "human" element and how the history of who stayed where figures into the landscape...you have to speak to racism...which was rampant in Miami in 1950s. One of the key elements to my new book is that Nat King Cole was not allowed to stay in the hotels he played in. Blacks...and Jews...had their own district in Miami and was expected to stay there.
It would be interesting to look at these social issues in context of style, but MIMO only takes a PEOPLE magazine stab at it. They avoid the real issues that create rifs even today.
If you think about i...more
MIMO really tries to be well-written...arty even...but that's distracting in a book like this.
I need the information for my new book, so I'd like more meat than a rat-pack homage that actually could have been set in ANY hotel in Miami beach, as the boys moved from one place to another.
And..if you're going to try to approach the "human" element and how the history of who stayed where figures into the landscape...you have to speak to racism...which was rampant in Miami in 1950s. One of the key elements to my new book is that Nat King Cole was not allowed to stay in the hotels he played in. Blacks...and Jews...had their own district in Miami and was expected to stay there.
It would be interesting to look at these social issues in context of style, but MIMO only takes a PEOPLE magazine stab at it. They avoid the real issues that create rifs even today.
If you think about i...more
Good points!
N.M.Thanks so much for all your thoughtful reviews. I'm pretty bad at accepting 1-5 star ratings without at least a sentence or two, and your reviews make me want to read the Harlan Coben mysteries, along with giving me food for thought about how so many books like MIMO write superficially about their subjects vs. giving us context in all areas as you pointed out.
BTW, my sister lives in Miami and my brother lives in Naples, so I have a yearly jaunt to Florida. It's a perfect place for a mystery and I thought of writing a series where the sleuths are two women from an assisted living place who are forced to find the murderer of one one of their husbands. That starts them on a series of capers as they never find the husband's killer, but they do solve a related crime. Have no idea what I'm talking about as I write mainstream fiction, but it sure sounds fun!
Val
