“Eduardo Santiago Is On Fire!” – David SedarisMidnight Rumba takes you to Cuba before the revolution and spans the years 1940 to 1959, when Fidel Castro came to power. The novel features six main characters, and takes you to Havana, where most of the action takes place, and also Madrid, Paris and Mexico City. Midnight Rumba is the second novel from Eduardo Santiago, the award-winning author of Tomorrow They Will Kiss.Cuba is Mr. Santiago's topic, and no one does it better. For more than a century, the island nation has fascinated Americans and tempted our politicians and our businesses. What is it about this place that still inspires the imagination? Mr. Santiago takes his cue from those gripping, sprawling 1950s novels that deftly combine personal passions with social and political upheaval (Edna Ferber's Giant, Leon Uris's Exodus). Midnight Rumba weaves together fact and fiction to tell the stories of average Cubans trying to live their lives in the midst of escalating turmoil. His characters anticipate bright futures, but what happens when they are all dreaming of and striving for radically different futures? Midnight Rumba centers on the Estelita de la Cruz, a young girl seeking to find her voice and her way in late '50s Havana. She is Cuba personified, such beauty, such potential, such hope, and yet, so many obstacles stand in her way, so many potential wrong turns. Which way to go? But Mr. Santiago doesn't stop there, he gives the reader a lively supporting cast of fully formed characters, all people who have a stake in the new Cuba and are making their own gambles to get there – Delfino, the haberdasher in love with a revolutionary; Aspirrina, a peasant whose improbable goal is to become the Cuban Isadora Duncan; Sor Maria, who eschews her aristocratic background only to discover that her convent can't hide her from the world; Esteban de la Cruz, a romantic rumba singer fallen into dissolution and desperate for redemption; Juan Carlos Talente, an orphan in Havana who believes he's found the golden ticket out of poverty and into power. They weave in an out of each other's lives and their stories intertwine with the movers and shakers of the era – Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, and even the masked Mexican wrestling legend, Santos. A gripping read on its own, Midnight Rumba also rips a page out of history to offer readers keen and unique insight into the decisions currently facing everyday people in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other societies wrestling with their futures. How do you choose between gangsters, crooks, corrupt politicians and wild-eyed revolutionaries? How do you tear down a broken society in order to build a better one? Can you ever know for sure which decision is right?Or do you just keep singing, just keep dancing, just keep praying and hope for a better world? Midnight Rumba is a page-turning epic story that readers will be unable to put down.

The perfect supplement to traditional guidebooks, PartyEuropes 429 pages are packed with over 600 reviews of fun and social, day and night activities in the 14 hottest European destinations. The unique manner in which it is written enables young travelers to customize reviews to match their own definition of fun in order to maximize every moment of their time abroad.

The New York Times bestselling author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel—a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death. The streets of New York are hungry tonight... Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals—and is bound to take more. The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie's botánica, where she worked. But the closer they’ve gotten, the more she’s seeing the world from Carlos’s point of view. In fact, she’s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that—because whatever is bringing out the dead, it’s only just getting started.

Who should be held responsible for public wrongs? By 2008, it finally seems that the Peruvian government is ready to make amends to its citizens following the violent guerilla movement of the last three decades. Otilia and Salvador, a mother and son torn apart during the conflict and separated for twenty years, are eager for the government to acknowledge their pain and suffering, but they hit a roadblock when the government denies responsibility in their legal case. Things begin to look up when Otilia meets Jerry, a kind man and the son of Jewish parents who escaped the Holocaust. Grappling with his own upbringing and the psychological struggles his parents endured, Jerry is just the person to empathize with Otilia's situation. Together, Otilia, Jerry, and Salvador must support one another through the turbulent journey that is healing from historical trauma, and through it, they must find the courage to rebuild their lives and open themselves up to love and companionship. Artfully weaving together different timelines and countries, Tobias examines the nuanced topic of grief a community endures after a collective tragedy. In this exploration of the culture of remembrance following displacement and loss, we discover what happens when our past calls us back to what we must do to achieve justice and reconciliation when we return.

In the Música Latina series, students experience the rhythms, styles, and musical characteristics of Latin American music. Each piece begins with a short rhythm exercise that prepares students for the rhythm patterns featured in the piece. A brief description of each title helps spark the imagination of the performer. Book 4 is written for late intermediate-level piano students. Titles: * Bosque nuboso * El mercado del puerto * Mambo para un mundo nuevo * Rumba medianoche * Trem para Paranaguá * Vals de un día Ilovioso

For discerning travelers, Night+Day Mexico City emphasizes the details that make the difference: the right hotel rooms to request, the best seat at restaurants, bars and clubs, and the prime time to be there, with equal billing for both nighttime and daytime activities. With signature sections include the 99 Best of the city, three unique Perfect Plan itineraries, the Cheat Sheet of essentials, Black Book index, Leaving Town recommendations and maps, Night+Day Mexico City is the essential guide for today's urbane traveler.

"The entire field of film historians awaits the AFI volumes with eagerness."--Eileen Bowser, Museum of Modern Art Film Department Comments on previous volumes: "The source of last resort for finding socially valuable . . . films that received such scant attention that they seem 'lost' until discovered in the AFI Catalog."--Thomas Cripps "Endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.