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Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy
Learning to Die in Miami Confessions of a Refugee Boy Author:Carlos Eire Following the National-Book-Award-winning Waiting for Snow in Havana, this is the ongoing memoir of exile and adolescent struggle in a new land. — With the same passionate immediacy as Eire brought to his memoir of a Cuban boyhood, the National Book Award–winning Waiting for Snow in Havana, he writes now about coming t... more »o America at age 11. The story takes readers from the journey to American itself -- Eire was one of 14,000 unaccompanied refugee children in 1962’s Operation Pedro Pan -- through his time in foster homes, both kind and harsh, and eventually to joining his uncle in Chicago, “where everyone came from somewhere else.”
Desperate to be American, the teen wants to kill the Cuban in himself, and the personal details are funny, furious, and heartbreaking, as he keeps changing his name (to Charles, Chuck, Charlie, back to Carlos). Now a professor at Yale, he still believes “bilingualism is crap.” He remembers prejudice and ignorance not only from classmates and textbooks but also in himself. He challenges sentimental slogans: absence does not make the heart grow fonder, as his reunion with his mother shows.« less