As a teenaged girl, Lara Canedo was torn from her roots when, at her motherÍs insistence, she left her native Havana for Spain as one of thousands of Cuban refugees of the late 1960s. Lara now finds herself, a mature adult, returning home ? but to a dilapidated capital that no longer resembles the city she left behind, and to a homeland that has been with her only subconsciously during twenty years in exile. As she revisits sites from her childhood and youth ? accompanied by Osvaldo, an old boyfriend hoping to rekindle their romantic past ? she encounters people and places that arouse suppressed memories. Even as she journeys through present and past, through subconscious and conscious, Lara crosses Cuba to visit her godmother, Clemencia, who has kept LaraÍs childhood journals for all these years. Reading through them allows Lara to clearly see the differences between then and now, reawakening her once-strong identity and granting her a sense of perspective she had never possessed before. Forced at last to confront the past after long denial, Lara is able to see the land of her birth anew, with eyes free of the unbridled and delusionary nostalgia she shares with so many exiles. She realizes that to remember means to actively acknowledge and use her memory to meld the split pieces of her life and so create a healing unity from them.

In July 2015, Abe Kogan navigated the streets of Havana, camera in hand, capturing the evocative beauty of an isolated island frozen in time. Kogan's black-and-white photographs, devoid of picturesque tropical landscapes and charming beach scenes, are provocative, intimate portraits of the daily lives of the Habaneros. These inner-city vignettes reveal Havana's urban pulse and focus on the dynamic community that inhabits a world on the brink of change. This book captures life on the pavement, which is where Havana's citizens spend their time--gossiping over balconies and languishing in the doorways of the once-glorious buildings that have fallen into ruin, their expressions marked by both vitality and hardship.

Can you remember one SPLIT-SECOND, that, for better or worse, changed your life? When you think of it, you could write a book; about the SPLIT-SECOND choices made, or that happenstance for change.

Split Seconds Havana is a 2017 Gold Award winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Photography. These captured shots within Split Seconds Havana occur smack in the midst of the pre-normalization of Cuban/US relations followed by the signing of the accord between the 2 nations, President Obama s visit, and Fidel Castro s death. This collection of black and white photos situates Havana inside of the dying embers of its 57 year relationship with orthodox communism. But now with its feet firmly planted in the pre-post Castro dance of modernity and change, bets are on that Havana is set to change and in a big way. The author is not sure how much change is in the cards. Nor how quickly it will manifest. Havana will reinvent itself regardless of change, rates of change, confluences or conflicts of influences he says. The shots presented here cut through the politics and the gossip of endless predictions spun by the international and local rumor mills. They portray a timeless face of Havana. A captivating and repeating humanity. "Generational Generalities" as he likes to say. Devoid of its powerful tropical flavors via his cancelation of color, landscapes and seascapes, Havana is stripped bare and reveals its inner city urban pulse. The metronome of its Habaneros.

An “entertaining” look at the psychology and neuroscience behind the act of influencing others (Kirkus Reviews). People try to persuade us every day. From the news to the Internet to coworkers and family, everyone and everything wants to influence our thoughts in some way. And in turn, we hope to persuade others. Understanding the dynamics of persuasion can help us to achieve our own goals—and resist being manipulated by those who don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. Psychologist Kevin Dutton has identified a powerful strain of immediate, instinctual persuasion, a method of influence that allows people to disarm skepticism, win arguments, and close deals. With a combination of astute methods and in-depth research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, Dutton’s fascinating and provocative book: Introduces the natural super-persuaders in our midst: Buddhist monks, magicians, advertisers, con men, hostage negotiators, and even psychopaths. Reveals which hidden pathways in the brain lead us to believe something even when we know it’s not true. Explains how group dynamics can make us more tolerant or deepen our extremism. Illuminates the five elements of SPICE (simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity, confidence, and empathy) for instantly effective persuasion. “[Split-Second Persuasion] offers some powerful insights into the art and science of getting people to do what you want.” —New Scientist

Florence, the city said to have been the birthplace of the Renaissance, is a culturally rich, architecturally magnificent, and scenically stunning backdrop for Abe Kogan's skillfully rendered black-and-white photography. His images capture Florence's enduring beauty in vivid portraits of modernism juxtaposed with ancient relics. Kogan's strikingly evocative images showcase bustling Florentine street life as well as atmospheric images of the city's parks, streets, and buildings. These dramatic photographs explore and celebrate the ageless appeal of Florence and the rich diversity of its inhabitants.

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

A novel about the murder of a Russian man in Cuba.

From Havana to Hollywood examines the presence or absence of Black resistance to slavery in feature films produced in either Havana or Hollywood—including Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, neglected masterpieces by Cuban auteurs Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Sergio Giral, and Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. Philip Kaisary argues that, with rare exceptions, the representation of Black agency in Hollywood has always been, and remains, taboo. Contrastingly, Cuban cinema foregrounds Black agency, challenging the ways in which slavery has been misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe. With powerful, richly theorized readings, the book shows how Cuban cinema especially recreates the past to fuel visions of liberation and asks how the medium of film might contribute to a renewal of emancipatory politics today.

The third in the Split Seconds series featuring evocative black-and-white photography that captures the timeless beauty of iconic cities Hong Kong provides a stunning backdrop for Abe Kogan's skillfully rendered black-and-white photography. The third in the Split Seconds series, following Havana and Florence, Hong Kong explores the city famous for its dense urbanism and high-rise marvels. The towering obelisks and repetitive facades of the modern megacity stand in stark contrast to its complex cultural roots--a city born of compromise between Chinese tradition and British influence. Kogan's strikingly evocative images showcase this intersection of influence with intimate portraits of bustling street life, iconic skylines, claustrophobic residential areas, maritime hubs, rugged coastline, and the parks and public spaces that provide a respite from the unrelenting vigor of the city.