Tropicana Nights: The Life And Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

It was to Havana what the Moulin Rouge was to Paris or the Blue Note to New York. The brightest jewel in 1950s Cuban nightlife, Tropicana was a "paradise under the stars" where you could gamble, hear the finest mambo and jazz musicians, and ogle the extravagantly risqué floorshows. Nat "King" Cole played Tropicana; so did Josephine Baker. Americans-celebrities and suburbanites both-were drawn to its kinetic sensuality and tropical setting. And Tropicana remained a uniquely Cuban institution; unlike most Havana nightclubs, it operated free from the American mob's control. Journalist Rosa Lowinger and Ofelia Fox, widow of Tropicana's last owner, vividly portray the cultural richness and roiling social problems of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and take the reader on an intimate insider's tour of one of the world's most glamorous venues at its most brilliant moment.

Tropicana Nights: The Life And Times Of The Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Lowinger, Rosa

Fox, Ofelia

Humor & Entertainment

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

At Tropicana you could play the roulette wheel, dance to the latest mambo or rumba, or simply ogle the parading goddesses of the flesh. It was the brightest jewel in 1950s Cuban nightlife, and Nat “King” Cole, Liberace, Josephine Baker, and Carmen Miranda performed there before audiences that included Ernest Hemingway, Marlon Brando, and Joan Crawford. In Tropicana Nights, Rosa Lowinger and Ofelia Fox, widow of Martin Fox, the club’s last owner, take us back to its glory years. Ofelia, the “first lady” of Tropicana, shares her memories, undimmed by decades of exile, with Rosa Lowinger, also a Cuban exile, whose parents frequented the club in its heyday. Together, Lowinger and Fox vividly portray the cultural richness and roiling social problems of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and take the reader on a tour of one of the world’s most glamorous venues at its most brilliant moment.

Mariner Books

Tropicana is to Cuba what the Bolshoi is to Russia, the Moulin Rouge to Paris, or the Blue Note to New York—an enduring cultural mecca. This definitive biography of the place that was known as Paradise Under the Stars, vividly describes the 1950s nightclub that was part casino, part cabaret and was the only club owned and run by Cubans rather than the American mob. Nat “King” Cole, Liberace, and Carmen Miranda performed there before audiences that included Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, and Ernest Hemingway. The book portrays the cultural richness and roiling social problems of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and takes the reader on a tour of one of the world’s most glamorous venues at its most brilliant moment.

Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Coralstone

What Kirkus describes as a "masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair" in a starred review, Dwell Time is an illuminating debut memoir by one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of art and architectural conservation; a moving portrait of a Cuban Jewish family's intergenerational trauma; and a story about repair and healing that will forever change how you see the objects and places we cherish and how we manage damage and loss. Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen - immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material. Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life. After moving away to escape the "cloying exile's nostalgia," Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage. Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice - Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family's story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger's relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx. Dwell Time is an immigrant's story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one's heart to another person's wounds. From the book: "How, I wondered, was it possible that no one in my family had ever told me that Havana, the place where we were from, was so closely aligned to my work? More importantly, how had I managed to reencounter this ornately decorated, sagging city at the precise moment when I was beginning to see a link between restoration of the material world and personal healing?"

Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair

Arts & Photography

Row House Publishing

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Books by Lowinger, Rosa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lowinger, Rosa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tropicana Nights: The Life And Times Of The Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Tropicana Nights: The Life And Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair