Informative, interesting account of Cuba. I wish the book was written in a more linear format. I found the jumping around of years to be distracring.

I've been to Cuba many times on holidays to warm my bones and get away from the cold Canadian winter for a few days. These were mostly resort vacations on Cuba's beautiful beaches. Quite a few years ago, a childhood friend and I were marking a common big birthday and we decided to spend a week in Havana, which was a different vacation altogether. We explored the neighbourhoods, we visited museums, monuments and the famed cemetery, we spent time on a beach with locals and we happened upon a huge political demonstration. I don't speak Spanish but my friend speaks Spanish, so we also had an opportunity to have some interesting conversations with a few residents of Havana -- for example, our female taxi driver who was a trained engineer but made more money driving taxis, and a journalist who gave us some insight into the challenges of reporting in Cuba. I came away amazed at this complex city with its beautiful crumbling old buildings and complex economic and social layers. And I felt like I only touched the tip of the iceberg.

Havana, written by Mark Kurlansky who also wrote Salt and Cod, was a great companion to my trip. In this relatively short book, Kurlansky surveys Havana's history, including the history of its slave trade, years of wealth and political turmoil, and more recent revolution. He explores issues of race and gender. He delves into Havana's literary, religious, architectural and musical histories. He explores Africa's influence on Havana and the Spanish spoken in Cuba. And much more. Every topic is explored briefly, so there isn't much room for depth but there's enough information to make it interesting. He also approaches Havana from a seemingly politically neutral position -- neither condemning nor romanticizing contemporary Havana but rather seeing some positive and some negative. Unusually for an American, Kurlansky appears to have traveled to Havana regularly since the early 1980s and his book is informed by research and his own observations and experiences. Ultimately, Havana feels like an ode to a complex, flawed but much loved city. I really enjoyed it given my own experience there, but I'm not sure how meaningful it would be to anyone who has not been to Havana or who doesn't plan to travel there. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

"Havana is not a city for people who are squeamish about sweat. Sweat is one of the many defining smells in redolent Havana and is a leitmotif in almost all Havana literature."

If you are familiar with Kurlansky's other non-fiction, for instance Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World or Salt: A World History. Imagine the same thorough look at a singular subject applied to the city of Havana. Mark Kurlansky has visited Cuba for decades, and has a great love for the city of Havana.

He examines history, architecture, politics, trade (especially ports!), food, music, and literature. Throughout the book he references characters or stories from Cuban literature, which I liked. At the end is an extensive bibliography of more reading, both fiction and non-fiction.

Havana is a very readable and informative book. It's wide scope includes history, literature, and even a few recipes. At the beginning of the book I was unsure about what would be the direction of the book, but as I continued, it was well organized.

(This review will be posted at the CCLaP website [cclapcenter.com] on March 7th, 2017. For any questions concerning it, please contact Jason Pettus at cclapcenter@gmail.com.)

Although I enjoyed Mark Kurlansky's newest nonfiction book <i>Havana</i>, I don't actually have a lot to say about it, simply because there's not much to it in the first place; not exactly a travel guide to this capital of Cuba, not exactly a history, and not exactly a memoir, it's instead a curious mix of them all, what you might call a "biographical sketch of a city" in the spirit of Peter Ackroyd's <i>London</i>. As such, then, it makes for pleasant surface-level reading, a book that has a general theme per chapter but then spits out random factoids within each of these chapters, full of interesting trivia (did you know that the Sloppy Joe sandwich was invented in Cuba?), but that never really digs down into a deeper or more meaningful look at this fascinating, complicated city. With the Obamian normalization of relations between the US and Cuba, now has never been a better time to read a light but engaging book like this, one that will give most Americans their first look at this most curious of Caribbean destinations; hopefully it will serve to whet your appetite for more.

Out of 10: <b>8.5</b>

Received this as a netgalley ARC and had many formatting issues on kindle and could not view the author's drawings. Moments of lovely prose, but overall it felt overly opinionated and arrogant in tone. At one point, the author wants to make the point that Habeneros care a lot about baseball. His anecdote is that a pimp ignores his prostitute (which he twice emphasizes is a mulatto) that he is trying to offer to the author when a conversation about baseball ensues. Absolutely unnecessary and offensive.