TELLING STORIES ABOUT MIAMI

Abstract

T.D. Allman. Miami: City of the Future. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 422 pp. Edna Buchanan. The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat. New York: Random House, 1987. 275 pp. Joan Didion. Miami. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 238 pp. American cities have long been associated with, and even come to symbolize, significant chapters of the American experience. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, New York City, with its massive infusion of immigrants, was the centre of, and symbol for, cultural assimilation. In the early twentieth century, the stockyards and railroads of Chicago symbolized the power of American industrialism. Since World War II, Americans have become increasingly enamored of the fantasy world of Las Vegas and have viewed Los Angeles as a center of cultural change. In the 1980s Americans have turned their attention to Miami. While the popular television series Miami Vice, with its emphasis on drugs, violence, fashion, rock music, alluring visuals and physically-attractive male stars, may largely have defined the popular image of Miami, since the early 1980s other media fare-at least two movies {Scarface, 1983, and The Mean Season, 1985), hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles (over three hundred in one year), and, for our purposes here, three recent books-have provided complementary, and often quite different, stories about this exotic city.