Traces the roots of the Cuban, black, white and Haitian communities in and around the city

Going to Miami

History

RIEFF, DAVID

Americas

Penguin??Books

Los Angeles : Capital of the Third World

JONATHAN CAPE.

A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Yale University Press

Africa

Traces the roots of the Cuban, black, white, and Haitian communities in and around the city

Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America

Little,Brown & Co

The author turns his critical eye to the City of Angels, discussing L.A.'s gridlocked freeways, immigrant neighborhoods, posh Beverly Hills, popular culture, health consciousness, and more, and speculates on the city's future

Los Angeles

Social Sciences

Simon&Schuster

A profile of exiled Cubans living in Miami focuses on their dreams, their feelings about their new country and the one they left behind, and their impact on the town of Miami

The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami

In "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World," David Rieff looks at a city that was long the epitome of the American Dream and is now, for many, the emblem of the American urban nightmare. Writing before the riots of 1992, Rieff found not a city of dreams but a city of bitter contradictions. A city that, like the United States itself, was being transformed by immigrants and refugees from Latin America and East Asia from an extension of Europe to a diverse patchwork of the peoples of the world. This is an L.A. that has never been described before, "a brilliant and disturbing examination," as Joan Didion called it, "of the America we have not yet faced."

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Offering a disturbing story of moral collapse, a portrait of the post-Cold War war in Bosnia reveals the U.N. contingents "standing by" as the genocide continues and aid workers risking their lives to help victims. 30,000 first printing. Tour.

Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West

"The Exile" is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century. David Rieff, whom the San Diego Tribune called our "modern Alexis de Tocqueville", has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.

Touchstone

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

Books by RIEFF, DAVID

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

Going to Miami

Los Angeles : Capital of the Third World

In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies

In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies

Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America

Los Angeles

The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami

Los Angeles

Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West

The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami