Learning to Die in Miami by Carlos Eire

Oops - this memoir is a sequel to a book I read last year but forgot to review at the time!  I had heard Carlos Eire interviewed on NPR and thought his story was interesting.

The first book was called Waiting for Snow in Havana.  In that book, Carlos is growing up in Cuba in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  His privileged and sheltered childhood comes to an abrupt end when he is among 14,000 chilren airlifted out of Cuba and sent to the U.S. upon Castro's ascendance.

This book picks up with Carlos adjusting to life in the U.S.  He is shuffled among family friends, foster homes, and other living arrangements, sometimes with his older brother and sometimes alone.  The title of the books is an allusion to his belief that "Carlos" from Cuba has to die for his American "Charles" or "Chuck" or other identity to emerge.  While the first book told a lot of his childhood, this one talks about him mostly as a pre-teen and teen, and flashes forward many times to his life as an adult.

Unlike other memoirs I've read that have been written in more than one part, these two books were very similar in style, tone, and composition.  I enjoyed Eire's style in fact - it was unusual - the books being written more as a reverie, a collection of memories, than as a straightforward linear narrative.  Eire was very poetic in places, very sad in others.  This was not a laugh-out-loud set of books, but I did learn about an immigrant experience I was unfamiliar with, and was compelled to read the second one.