Going to Miami

by David Rieff

Traces the roots of the Cuban, black, white and Haitian communities in and around the city

Genres: Travel

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 1988

About the author

David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America was first published in 1987, a year which saw the publication of two other non-fiction books about Miami: T.D. Allman’s Miami: City of the Future, and Joan Didion’s Miami. Back then, Miami was hot: Miami Vice dominated the airwaves and the Iran-Contra scandal was playing out.

So it is perhaps understandable that David Rieff’s effort has aged as poorly as Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs’ unconstructed linen jackets and pastel T-shirts. What is less forgivable is its aggrieved air, unapologetic racism and appalling writing, which lurches from the overblown to the non-sequiturial — and sometimes manages both:

“I had forgotten how fast Cuban Spanish was, almost like Spanish jazzed by amphetamine. Nor was it easy to distinguish the words, which fall out of the speaker’s mouth like Marines pouring out of a landing craft onto a hostile beach.”

“Most evenings, I would return home in darkling, wintry New York to the tropical gouaches of days-old Miami newspapers. The tales they had to tell seemed less like the tragedies they overwhelmingly were than like melodramas in which the blood was ketchup and the tears the dubious exertion of method acting.”

If you are interested in the Miami of the 1980s, you would be better off reading T.D. Allman or Joan Didion’s versions — or even dusting off your Miami Vice DVDs.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just fantastic. So well-written, very funny, and Rieff's eye for the city is impressively sharp for an outsider. To focus on its datedness (Miami Vice reference, etc.), as the other reviewers have done here, is to point out a small and amusing drawback in this otherwise insightful book.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[George P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated but still interesting. Rambles a lot; more of the better writing is toward to end.
I don't know of any connection between my family and the author but there may be a distant one. His father was a university professor, Phillip Rieff and his mother was writer-feminist Susan Sontag.