Rating: 
Summary: A Burned, Thick Beauty
Review: This book may very well be the most moving book that I will end up reading this year. Some of that no doubt has to do with learning a bit about my own Cuban heritage (mi aubela es de Cuba), but it also has to do with reading an author of uncommon grace and depth, who lacks neither humor nor bitterness in remembering and longing for his abruptly ended childhood. You can't help but to get misty eyed in the midst of your laughter; Eire lets the reader feel in ways that most authors can, at their best, only dream of.
It is rare that an author can combine multiple streams of thought into a [raging] river that contains both depth and complexity, but Eire appears to be one such author, combining history, memoir, theology and philosophy into a thick narrative about his childhood exile from Cuba. He is endowed with a tremendous sense of the poetic; he writes sensuously of Cuban nights before the Revolution, the perplexities of childhood (some experience really are universal) and the uneasiness of Cuba after Castro seized power.
Eire is not without bitterness, either, as he reflects upon his exile and the difficulties it caused his family. He never saw his father again after he left Cuba, but his father also chose to not come over to the US with his mother; the mockery and sarcasm that Eire directs towards his father is understandable given the relational distance that his father placed within the relationship.
The real highlight of the book, however, is Eire's ability to evoke emotion from the reader as he recalls his childhood. Reading his memories of Roman Catholic masses and schools is absolutely side splitting; the mixture of memory and imagination is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that brings to light the subjective reality of various events. In reading of the (privileged) state of Eire's life before Castro, the anger that he feels due to Castro makes that much more sense.
This is a book well worth reading. The voice of exile that is Eire's is a beautiful one that runs deeper than the surface: it has its scars and memories, its hopes and prayers. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: A Cuban Pentimento
Review: This book ostensibly is a memoir about the author's last few years as a child in Cuba, before being airlifted, without his parents, to the US in 1962 as part of the infamous Operation Pedro (Peter) Pan, and also about his initially very difficult adaptation to life in the US. But as the reader peels back layer after layer of Professor Eire's story, he soon realizes that it is far, far more than a memoir. It is a novel-like tour of both life's mysteries and life's little details as seen through the eyes of a child, in this case made far more poignant because of the author's particular life circumstances. Professor Nieto Eire weaves a special kind of historical/spiritual tapestry, recounting real events through use of natural and religious imagery to give the reader not just a sense for what physically happened to him and his loved ones, but also what happened to him spiritually and intellectually, when Fidel Castro elected in 1959 to imprison the Cuban soul. This book is high (very high) literature indeed, and what I most enjoyed about it is its ability, in the space of any five pages, to evoke from the reader a wide range of emotions; from joy to sadness, from laughter to tears, from dread to relief. Through it all, the reader develops an understanding for the uniquely Cuban experience, and also for how special a person Carlos Eire must be.
Rating: 
Summary: Sense of total bewilderment.
Review: This is a 'most read' book.
Through the eyes of a young boy I was able to feel the pain, disillusion and fear he experienced, first in Cuba and then in the USA.
I did perceive in his words, the triumph of the human spirit.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, moving, important
Review: This is a book for any time of day or night, any season, any person, anyone who loves writing, thinking, memory, culture, movies, faith, history and anyone who was ever a child.
it is a perfect gift book as well as one to keep for your own library.
Images abound and hang in the mind after the book is put down--to be re-read.
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book!!!
Review: This is a great Book! It is my favorite! This is how every Cuban child feels when they are pulled out of the country they love. I recommend this book to all who want to understand that socialism/communism does NOT work. I recommend this also to All Cubans, because at one point or another we feel nostalgic!
Rating: 
Summary: Crocodile Tears in Havana
Review: This is a misty-eyed memoir of an egoistical man who had a very privileged childhood. Because that idealized world was sundered, he believes he has a deeper take on suffering and displacement and he asks the reader to sympathize with his plight and along the way, to blame it all on Castro. The writing is precious, almost cloyingly so--one would expect a historian to be more careful of his language. If the Cuba he remembers is a paradise lost, then he needs to move on. Cuba has survived well enough without him.
Rating:
Summary: MEMORY LANE EXOTICA
Review: THIS IS A WONDERFUL REMINISCENCE OF A LIFE DISAPPEARED. ANYONE WITH ANY INTEREST IN WHAT CUBA WAS LIKE IN THE FIFTIES SHOULD PICK THIS UP. THE PICTURE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS, ITS PREJUDICES, ITS CHARMED IF IMPERFECT LIVES, AND ITS EVENTUAL DISPPEARANCE IS SOCIOLOGICALLY IMPORTANT, SINCE THIS STORY APPLIES NOT JUST TO CUBA BUT TO ANY SOCIETY THAT HAS UNDERGONE AN UPHEAVAL AND BEEN DESTROYED. A GREAT READ, BEATIFULLY WRITEN.
Rating:
Summary: A Top Ten book
Review: This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. I can't remember the last time I gave 5 stars. Using tales of his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, full of wonderful characters and magical places, he tells of his awakening to the changes caused by a revolution that he can not control.What makes this book so amazing is Mr. Eire's use of the English language - both in his descriptions of his beloved country and his use of various writing styles. In one particular chapter, the writing style speaks louder about the emotion of an event than the words themselves. It is brilliant. Mr. Eire uses childhood events to describe emotion in a way not seen often in today's writing. How he can use a boy's tyrannical (and deadly) pranks with lizards to describe the gut-wrenching anger over losing his parents and his whole world is beyond me - but it works magnificently! This is a beautiful portrait of a boy's life disrupted and the courage of a man that pieces it back together again. Out of that pain comes an intimate portrait of a man's attempt to make sense of it all. Read it - then pass it on or buy the book for everyone you know!
Rating: 
Summary: A Fidelista Complex in the Confessional
Review: This memoir of a Cuban childhood marked by suburban normalcy interrupted by revolution is loaded with real and make-believe boogey men. There's plenty to frighten Carlos Eire's pious child-self: a portrait of Christ in the dining room which speaks, a creepy lady-shaped candlestick, backyard lizards. These quirky fears are offset by two loving if quirky parents (the father, a judge, thinks he was Louis XVI in a previous lifetime), and a decent older brother. The best part of Eire's childhood was having all the American good stuff -- cartoons on TV and Lionel train sets -- while living in a far superior place: superior because in Cuba no one stops your dad from driving you along a stormy sea for some "car-surfing." Before big bully Fidel Castro kicks out Batista and cancels Christmas, the person little Carlos' reviles most is his adopted brother, Ernesto (no relation to Che). We don't learn exactly why till near the end of the book. When we do, Eire is almost paralyzed by the hurt still; the narrative becomes raw, even propagandistic, as the crime of his adopted brother and the family's dissolution comes at us just as we are getting the strongest doses yet of anti-Castro rhetoric.
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