A personal and cultural mediation, Philip D. Beidler s The Island Called Paradise explores the fascinating ways Cuban history and culture have permeated North American consciousness, and vice versa.
In The Island Called Paradise, Philip D. Beidler shares his personal discovery of the vast, rich, and astonishing history of the island of Cuba and the interrelatedness of Cuba and the US.
Cuba first entered Beidler s consciousness in the early 1960s when he watched with mesmerized anxiety the televised reports of the Cuban missile crisis, a conflict that reduced a...

In these essays, a combination of personal remembrance and broad-stroke cultural history, Philip Beidler addresses the culture and politics of postWWII America: the national blindness toward the Holocaust and a rising China, the canker of McCarthyism, ascendant cultures of hard smoking and heavy drinking, the worship of cars and film idols, and the chronic fear of an always-possible nuclear apocalypse. In lively, driving prose, he recalls veiled episodes in the history of the Korean War, the civil rights movement, and the struggle for women s liberation. On these subjects and many others,...