Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy

by Eire, Carlos; Published by Free Press (2010)

With the same passionate immediacy as Eire brought to his memoir of a Cuban boyhood, the National Book Award–winning Waiting for Snow in Havana (2002), he writes now about coming to America at age 11. The story takes readers from the journey to American itself – Eire was one of 14,000 unaccompanied refugee children in 1962’s Operation Pedro Pan – through his time in foster homes, both kind and harsh, and eventually to joining his uncle in Chicago, “where everyone came from somewhere else.”