Interviews, excerpts from diaries and letters, newspaper accounts, profiles of famous individuals, and pictures from family albums portray the Cuban American experience.

"A superlative, riveting history" (BookPage) of Mary Shelley's creation of Frankenstein and the personal and poetic background behind the story. One murky night in 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, famed English poet, challenged his friends to a contest--to write a ghost story. The assembled group included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his lover (and future wife) Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; Mary's stepsister Claire Claremont; and Byron's physician, John William Polidori. The famous result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work that has retained its hold on the popular imagination for almost two centuries. Less well-known was the curious Polidori's contribution: the first vampire novel. And the evening begat a curse, too: Within a few years of Frankenstein's publication, nearly all of those involved met untimely deaths. Drawing upon letters, rarely tapped archives, and their own magisterial rereading of Frankenstein itself, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler have crafted a rip-roaring tale of obsession and creation.

This work explores how relationships of blood, marriage, sex, and residence work in each type of Cuban family, particularly as it is affected by Cuba's struggle to transform its economy. It also examines historical perspectives on the contemporary Cuban family, ethnicity and race, marriage, the extended family, family rights, the emigrating family, United States' citizenship issues, religion and the Cuban-American family. Tables list such details as population numbers, age, life expectancy, growth, birth, and death rates, immigration and mortality rates, HIV rates and literacy. The book also includes narratives of childhood memories from pre-revolutionary Cuba to the late 20th century, providing fresh insights into the cultural value attached to the family.

Turn the pages of your family scrapbook or picture album and faces and memories leap out at you. Even if you never knew or don't remember some of your relatives, the snapshots and keepsakes make them familiar, and the old family stories never fail to bring a laugh and a warm memory. Now turn through the albums of other families--many other families--and see their grandfathers' and great-grandmothers' faces and read their stories. Why did they leave the old country? How did they get to America? What did they do when they got here? Why did they live the way they did? What did they think of the new homeland? What did other people think about them? How did they get along? The family album holds some of the answers. The American Family Albums tell the multicolored and often heroic stories of American immigrant groups, largely through their own words and pictures. Like any family album or scrapbook, the pages contain many period photographs and other memorabilia. These join with original documents--including selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers--to bring the immigrant experience vividly to life. Each book is a pictorial and written record of the "old country" left behind, the journey to America, the life that the newcomers made for themselves in their adopted country, and the group's contributions to the brilliant diversity of these United States.

"America was the place Smith had dreamed of his whole life.There, his character, determination, and ambition had propelled him to the top of society. He spent the rest of his life trying to return. Though he failed, he pointed the way for others, who were drawn by the dream that opportunity was here for anyone who dared seize it . . . Smith founded more than a colony. He gave birth to the American dream." --from Captain John Smith Captain John Smith tells the real story behind the swashbuckling character who founded the Jamestown colony, wrote the first book in English in America, and cheated death many times by a mere hairbreadth. Based on rich primary sources, including Smith's own writings and newly discovered material, this enlightening book explores Smith's early days, his forceful leadership at Jamestown that was so critical to its survival, and his efforts upon his return to England to continue settlements in America. This unique volume also reveals the truth behind Smith's relationship with Pocahontas, a tale that history has greatly distorted. Bringing to life heroic deeds and dramatic escapes as well as moments of great suffering and hardship, Captain John Smith serves as a great testament to this important historical figure.

An expanded, updated edition of the classic study of Cuban-American culture, this engaging book, which mixes the author’s own story with his reflections as a trained observer, explores how both famous and ordinary members of the “1.5 Generation” (Cubans who came to the United States as children or teens) have lived “life on the hyphen”—neither fully Cuban nor fully American, but a fertile hybrid of both. Offering an in-depth look at Cuban-Americans who have become icons of popular and literary culture—including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, musician Pérez Prado, and crossover pop star Gloria Estefan, as well as poets José Kozer and Orlando González Esteva, performers Willy Chirino and Carlos Oliva, painter Humberto Calzada, and others—Gustavo Pérez Firmat chronicles what it means to be Cuban in America. The first edition of Life on the Hyphen won the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award and received honorable mentions for the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.