text: 
  This is a complex and detailed history chiefly of Cuban exiles in South Florida and the influence they have been able to wield regionally and internationally with and without the help of various U.S. administrations. In that sense, it is the story of two cities - Miami and Washington - and two peoples - Americans and Cubans.  
  
  I have an objection, though, with the stone-hard style in which this volume is so meticulously, even gorgeously at times, written. Didion strives to be so achingly academic that there is little real heart to this book and, worse, the result is a cold, humorless, colorless story that is at times an unappealing example of ideological abstractions and alphabet soup. 
  
  The author, in her conspicuously clean and parenthetical prose, apparently is so charged by the subject of her research that she has forgotten there are people on the other end - readers. It is, in that sense, a boring little disaster of a book. 
  