Carlos Eire

Carlos new book is out,  learn more on his Amazon page

Here’s more information from Bookpage.com:

Learning to Die in Miami opens with the 11-year-old Eire’s arrival in Miami in 1962. Along with his older brother, Tony, he was one of 14,000 children who fled Castro’s Cuba in what became known as the Pedro Pan airlift. “When the flights ceased abruptly in October of 1962,” Eire says, “there were still 80,000 on the island waiting to leave.” Among those was the boys’ mother. So for the next three years the brothers bounced miserably from place to place until they were finally reunited with their mother in Chicago, where things changed without getting all that much better.   Up to a point, Eire says, his story is a representative one. “For all of us, there was the pattern of arriving at the camps and being sent somewhere else. Many of us were sent to institutions or to foster families. Many of us bounced from one place to another. And then there was the even more painful part of the pattern—reuniting with your family. . . . [You] had to care for your mom. You had to go apartment hunting and find an apartment rather than the adult, because the adult was totally clueless and helpless and didn’t speak the language.”…...Learn More

Carlos M. N. Eire was born in Havana, in 1950. In 1962 he fled to the United States as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of communist Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan. After living in several foster homes, he was reunited with his mother in 1965, but his father was never able to leave the island. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1979.. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), A Very Brief History of Eternity ( Princeton, 2009), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1450-1700 (forthcoming, Yale, 2011). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (Prentice Hall, 1997). His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), which won the National Book Award in nonfiction for 2003, has been translated into thirteen languages, but is banned in Cuba, where he is considered an enemy of the state. The sequel to this memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, will be published in November 2010 (Free Press).

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

From Publishers Weekly:

“Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones,” Yale historian Eire writes in this beautifully fashioned memoir, as he recounts one of many wonderfully vibrant stories from his boyhood in 1950s Havana. As imaginatively wrought as the finest piece of fiction, the book abounds with magical interpretations of ordinary boyhood events-playing in a friend’s backyard is like a perilous journey through the jungle; setting off firecrackers becomes a lyrical, cosmic opera; a child’s birthday party turns into a phantasmagoria of American pop cultural icons. Taking his cue from his father, a man with “a very fertile, nearly inexhaustible imagination, totally dedicated to inventing past lives,” Eire looks beyond the literal to see the mythological themes inherent in the epic struggle for identity that each of our lives represents. Into this fantastic idyll comes Castro-”Beelzebub, Herod, and the Seven-Headed Beast of the Apocalypse rolled into one”-overthrowing the Batista regime at the very end of 1958 and sweeping away everything that the author holds dear. A world that had been bursting with complicated, colorful meaning is replaced with the monotony of Castro’s rhetoric and terrorizing “reform.” Symbols of Jesus that had once provided spiritual enlightenment by popping up in the author’s premonitions and dreams were now literally being demolished and destroyed by a government that has outlawed religion. The final cataclysm comes when Eire and his brother, still young boys, are shipped off to the United States to seek safety and a better life (another paradise, perhaps). They never see their father again.As painful as Eire’s journey has been, his ability to see tragedy and suffering as a constant source of redemption is what makes this book so powerful. Where his father believed that we live many lives in different bodies, Eire sees his own life as a series of deaths within the same body. “Dying can be beautiful,” he writes, “And waking up is even more beautiful. Even when the world has changed.” Taking his cue from his beloved Jesus, the author believes that we repeatedly die for our sins and are reborn into a new awareness of paradise. How fortunate for readers, then, that by way of Eire’s “confessions,” they too will be able to renew their souls through his transcendent words.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Continue at the Amazon Page

Carlos Eire

“Ten piedad de mí, Señor, cubano soy”. En 1962, Carlos Eire fue uno de los 14.841 niños que fueron transportados fuera de Cuba en el puente a?reo conocido como la Operación Pedro Pan—exiliado de su familia, de su patria y de su propia niñez por la Revolución. Los recuerdos de su vida en La Habana cobran vida en estas memorias evocativas e inolvidables.

Nieve en La Habana es a su vez un exorcismo y una oda a un mundo perdido. La Cuba de la niñez de Carlos, con sus lagartijas y su mar azul turquesa bañado por un sol esplendoroso, se convierte en una isla maldita con la llegada al poder de un guerrillero llamado Fidel Castro. De pronto la música callejera se transforma en tiroteos, las pascuas navideñas quedan prohibidas, la disidencia conlleva encarcelamiento y casi todos los amigos de Carlos deben irse de Cuba rumbo a un lugar tan lejano e inconcebible como los Estados Unidos. Carlos también terminará en ese mismo exilio, y cumplirá el deseo de su madre de convertirse en un hombre americano moderno —aun si su alma permanece en el país que lo vio nacer.

Narrado con la urgencia de una confesión, Nieve en La Habana es un elogio a una patria arruinada y un amoroso testimonio del espíritu colectivo de todos los cubanos, dondequiera que estén.

Nieve en La Habana: Confesiones de un cubanito

“Una visión nostálgica de un mundo perdido”.
—The Miami Herald

“La expresión literaria mejor lograda sobre el exilio presentada hasta la fecha. La evocación que Eire hace de su niñez es lo más conmovedor y duradero de este libro, gracias a su extraordinaria habilidad literaria”.
—Los Angeles Times

“Rebosante de detalles e imágenes maravillosas, y lleno de personajes tan bien desarrollados que parecen estar sentados a tu lado en el sofá”.
—The Washington Post

“Eire está dotado de lo que puede llamarse “precisión lírica”, la facilidad de atrapar la vivencia de un momento específico a través de sus detalles sensuales… Una biografía tan llena de energía como de estilo”.
—The Boston Globe…… La pagina the Amazon