Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
A Novel
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A dramatic novel of love, revolution, and redemption from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed
When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight. So begins a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro.
Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn, and his unpredictable Cuban wife, Renata, face-to-face with the darkest facets of human nature and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.
Kennedy masterfully gathers together an unlikely cast of vivid characters in a breathtaking adventure full of music, mysticism, and murder. This is an unforgettably riotous story set against the landscape of the civil rights movement as it challenges the legendary and vengeful Albany political machine.
William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize winner Kennedy continues to chronicle his native Albany, N.Y., after a detour through Cuba, in his bracing new novel (after Roscoe). American journalist Daniel Quinn is in 1950s Havana reporting the revolution. In the Floridita bar, Ernest Hemingway introduces him to 23-year-old Cuban socialite Renata Otero, and Quinn is bewitched at first sight. An assassination attempt on Batista led by a group of revolutionaries that includes Renata's lover lands her in hot water, but Quinn's connections both political and revolutionary open doors for Renata that set her free and lead Quinn to Fidel's secret Sierra Maestra camp. These heady days of revolution inform the novel's second turbulent period 1968 and find Quinn back in Albany covering the machinations of the Democratic steamroller that is slowly crushing the capital's largely black urban poor. Robert Kennedy has just been shot, and in the course of that day Quinn receives unexpected visitors from his past and documents the racial tension boiling over in Albany. Kennedy's journalistic training is manifest in a clear, sure voice that swiftly guides the reader through a rich, multilayered, refreshingly old-school narrative. Thick with backroom deal making and sharp commentary on corruption, Kennedy's novel describes a world he clearly knows, and through plenty of action, careful historical detail, and larger-than-life characters, he brilliantly brings it to life.
Customer Reviews
Very Disappointing
I have enjoyed a few of Kennedy's books but did not finish this one. I did not care about the characters nor what happened to them...EAF