It is not hard to understand why Carlos Eire's memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana won the 2003 National Book Award for nonfiction. It is beautifully written in a poetic style that I cannot compare to anyone else's. His boyhood memories come alive with perfectly balanced doses of hilarity and poignancy and they are fascinating.

Carlos Eire was born in Havana in 1950 and left in 1962, one of fourteen hundred children who arrived in the United States without their parents, airlifted out of Fidel Castro's Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan. Eire and his brother were reunited with their mother three years later, but never saw their father again.

This memoir describes the tropical paradise that was the Havana of his childhood, the games he and his friends liked to play, the movie theaters, the ocean, the pools. Oh, and the lizards. Eire had a special fear and hatred for the lizards. Anyway, when Castro took over, absolutely everything about their lives was changed. Their entire culture was erased in a way that is hard to imagine, and it happened very, very quickly.