Miami

Considered by many as the country’s most dynamic, fastest growing and sexiest city, Miami is more popular than ever before. Yet, it is a city that doesn’t merely change but evolves, never rewriting the past, just adding to its illustrious heritage. And this is the real beauty of Miami. The chic Surf Club and the vibrant Faena Hotel did not replace the emblematic Raleigh of the 1940s nor the Ritz Carlton of the 50s, rather they complement them. Classics like Joe’s Stone Crab continue to serve their signature fare to sell-out crowds each night, as new establishments attract with name chefs. The iconic art deco architecture remains on full display as the modern Herzog & de Meuron-designed Perez Art Museum stands in stark contrast. Replete with arts and culture year round from the international art at The Bass to the street art of Wynwood Walls, each December, the city is taken over by the global cultural elite for Art Basel Miami Beach, a fair that attracts over 80,000 visitors who turn out for the momentous art, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s show stopping “Comedian”, and the exuberant festivities hosted each evening.

- An insider's guide to Miami's hidden gems and lesser-known spots - Written by a true local, filled with independent advice, based on thorough research and the author's personal opinions - An inspirational and practical guide to the city's most interesting places, buildings, restaurants, shops, museums, galleries, neighborhoods, gardens and cafes, into 100 lists of 5 secrets - Photography by Valerie Sands - A recently updated edition in Luster's successful and attractive series of city guides With this new guide in your bag, you're set to go out and discover the best and most fun places in hotspot Miami: 500 addresses that many tourists don't know, a bit off the beaten track, but always loved by the locals and worth a visit. The 500 Hidden Secrets of Miami will take you to all the places that make Miami the lively and unique city it is, also known as the 'Gateway to the Caribbean', such as: the 5 nicest water views, 5 stunning Mediterranean revival buildings, 5 renowned Miami-based fashion designers, the 5 coolest hotel pools, and 5 wonderful parks, playgrounds, and museums to visit with your kids. It even includes some unusual experiences, such as swimming in a freshwater Venetian pool, or day trips to the Everglades and the Keys.

"In the book's impressionistic and personal moments, Rieff succeeds in capturing the mood of the city. He is pleasantly open to the place he is exploring and generally maintains a stance of naïveté--the mark of a good travel writer."--New York Times Book Review "A clear, insightful book of firsthand impressions of Florida's once-heralded Magic City and what its flamboyant Latinization since the 1960s means. Rieff looks thoughtfully at Miami as America's New Havana, with a nod to the image fostered by TV's Miami Vice--an easygoing recital of his visits with some of Miami's most influential Cuban leaders, ranging from moderates to possibly murderous, anti-Castro politicos, along with tours of the city's now-famed Calle Ocho stretch."--Publishers Weekly "David Rieff gives Miami the treatment it deserves: an anti-travelogue that tours states of mind and basks in projected images. . . . No cub reporter, he wisely dodges the dry testimony of experts in favor of the hunches that emerge from after-dinner gossip. His factual storehouse is stocked with random bits of the social environment: menus, in-flight movies, graffiti, Toltec pottery, Phil Donahue."--Commentary "A book that restores one's faith in the foreignness of America. A shrewd, inquisitive guide to a city that has been over-glamourized, much condescended to (though not by Rieff), and rarely understood--and to one of the world's oddest and most intensely knit exiled communities, the Cubans in Miami. Read before heading south."--Robert Hughes, author of The Fatal Shore From David Rieff's preface to the new edition: "This book is a personal narrative as well as a book about Miami at the moment in the mid-1980s when the transformation of the city by its Cuban exile population was achieving critical mass. . . . I never believed that Miami was, as some people said at the time, 'the new Casablanca' or the capital of Latin America. What I did believe--and continue to believe--is that it was a harbinger of many things about America's future, from the inescapability of the Spanish language and of the further hispanicization of the United States to the broader phenomenon of a radical demographic shift in which the country, in only a few generations, has gone from being comprised largely of people of European and, to a lesser extent, African origin, to being an anthology of the world's peoples. That is now clear." David Rieff is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West; The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami; and Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. His work appears regularly in various publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, New Republic, and Newsweek. He is a freelance journalist and writer living in New York City.

This study focuses on street art and large-scale murals in metropolitan Miami/Dade County, while also foregrounding the diasporic and aesthetic interventions made by migrant and second-generation artists whose families hail from the Caribbean and Latin America. Jana Evans Braziel argues that Caribbean and Latinx street artists define and visually mark the city of Miami as a diasporic, transnational urban space. These artists also help define Miami as a cosmopolitan city, yet one that is also a distinctly Caribbean and Latinx urban space, and simultaneously resist but also (at times reluctantly) participate in the forces of gentrification and urban re/development, particularly through the myriad and complex ways in which street art contributes to city branding and art tourism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban studies, American studies, and Latin American/Caribbean studies.

Revealed: the dark and delicious side of Paradise.

This book takes the reader on a tour of Miami, through micro and macro views of the people, cultures, politics, neighborhoods, money, and even insects that comprise the variety of the city.

During the late 1800s, prospectors in search of gold, silver, and copper began to settle around the Pinal Mountains area in Miami. By 1918, several mining companies had established roots and contributed to the town’s booming growth. The community established housing, schools, a hospital, and a town government, and the population grew to 5,000. Soon, Miami achieved recognition as one of the main mining towns in the state, along with neighboring Globe, Jerome, Morenci, Superior, Ajo, and Ray-Sonora. The new mining opportunities brought immigrants from around the world to settle in the area and eventually turned Arizona into a leading contributor to the copper industry. Although mining’s hold on the local economy has changed over the years, today at least 20 percent of Miami-area employment is centered around copper mining, which remains close to the heart of the first hardy miners’ descendants.

This book makes a contribution to the debates on diasporic identities and transnational communication. It provides an analysis of the Cuban American community and its relationship to Miami-based English- and Spanish-language media. Based on extensive ethnographic data, the author demonstrates how different media have been used, produced and influenced by segments of the Cuban American community in Miami. After establishing the significance of Miami as a locale to receive a high number of migrants after the Cuban revolution in 1959, what follows is an exploration of the interplay of collective Cuban American identity and the evolution of an exile community on the one hand and media institutions and their output on the other. In doing so, Miami-based press, radio, network television and online media are examined. The author moreover shows how mediated memories of pre-revolutionary Cuba have been kept alive in Miami and over time became more inclusive through the use of new media technologies.