Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 is a brick of a book that attempts to cover a vast topic: the Protestant Reformation, its causes and consequences, with a focus on western Europe but also some coverage of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. (Scandinavia and eastern Europe get short shrift here.) That Eire was attempting to make this “a narrative for beginners and nonspecialists” makes the task he took on here even more daunting. It’s not one that I think he show more succeeded at.

Eire clearly has a wide-ranging knowledge of early modern history, but I had a number of issues with his characterisation of medieval religion (very clearly not his area of expertise) and indeed how he thinks of what “religion” is. He argues again and again for “religion” as a driving force in history that needs to be studied on its own terms, but never grapples with the fact that his concept of “religion” is one posited on a lot of assumptions that what “religion” is is what Christianity looks like. (See also, for instance, the fact that Eire at one point near the end of the book refers to Christianity as “Europe’s ancestral religion”—hoo boy, and that definitely ensured I wasn’t surprised to google him and find that he’s the kind of Christian who talks blithely about “Judeo-Christian values.”)

His grasp of early modern history is also not total—while I’m not an early modernist, I am Irish, and there were a couple of times that his brief references to what was happening in Ireland made me blink.

This is also a determinedly old-school history: an intellectual/political history that’s largely driven by elites and in which women scarcely appear as actors. (There’s perhaps a page in which Eire acknowledges that histories of women in the Reformation exist, but snidely dismisses them as ideological axe grinding—ironically enough on the grounds that they dare to ask the same kinds of questions (were women better off because of the Reformation? worse?) that he chastises historians in his conclusion for not daring to ask of the Reformation more generally.) And while it’s laudable that Eire tackles the spread of European Christianity to other parts of the world during the early modern period—a topic that most textbooks on Europe during the period often ignore—his characterisation of missionary activities made me suck my teeth more than once. Missionaries and their work are referred to as “heroic”; the “success” of missions is calculated in terms of numbers of converts. Eire might not outright talk about civilizing the natives, but the implications are clear, and distasteful.

Cramming more than two centuries of complex global history into fewer than 900 pages is a feat of concision. Yet I feel like it’s still probably going to be overwhelming for most “beginners and nonspecialists”, and the average undergrad would probably balk on being assigned this. Eire’s language (“hermeneutic”, “soteriology”, “dialectic”, etc) wouldn’t help there either. Yet it would also be an odd fit in a graduate seminar, I think: no footnotes, and determinedly Anglophone and overwhelmingly male bibliography. show less

The blurb on the back of my copy of this book says that it both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost: Mr. Eire's memories of his boyhood as a member of the Cuban upper classes, the wrenching transformation of his country after Castro's revolution and his emmigration to America as part of an airlift of 14,000 children dubbed Operation Pedro Pan.

As one who has a love of magical realism in Latin American fiction, this book is magical realism come to life as the author talks about his show more parents past lives as the King & Queen of France, as he sees Jesus through his dining room window and ponders the horrors of the lizards that are everywhere in Havana. Many of these images can be ascribed to memories that are hazy with time and that dwell in early childhood. Are they really memories or are they memories of what has been told in the family over and over again until they seem real? It really doesn't matter as the author's writing is so compelling that I could not put this book down. show less

Considering that Carlos Eire was only eleven years old when he left Cuba, this book could have gone wrong in a lot of different ways. From a certain perspective, it's nothing but a series of childhood reminiscences, not too different from the kind that any upper-middle class Cuban boy of his generation might have. He talks about Cuba's beautiful skies, its seashore, its daily rituals, and a bit about its fragile social structure. But he mines this material for all that it's worth. And show more specifically because his life is now a closed book, every one of these forty brief chapters is impregnated with terrible longing and loss. It also helps that the author's got a sharp eye, a good sense of structure -- these little chapters frequently connect to others or circle back on themselves -- and a well-developed sense of irony. Considering that his father -- athough often kind, caring and boyishly playful -- actually seems to have believed himself to be a reincarnation of Louis XIV of France, he probably needed that last quality.

But "Waiting for Snow in Havana" also goes deeper, in some ways, than the average midlife memoir has to. Like Eire, I moved countries at a young age, although, unlike him, I've never been any sort of refugee. Even so, I found parts of this book excruciatingly difficult to read, and the author's description of the profound effect that this event had on not just his life but on his deepest self rings very true. Eire still considers him fundamentally, inalterably Cuban, and the reader can sense how the memories he includes here have sustained him throughout his life. At the same time, the rude shock of being separated from his family and culture and losing his social status also shaped his adulthood. In its last chapters, we can see that "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is much more than an exercise in upper-class nostalgia. Eire fully embraces the fact that he had to face great adversity and grow from it: he's turned his exile and the sometimes fragmentary memories he took from Cuba into a way to discover himself and who he is. This book won't suit anyone, but I suspect that lots of people who's had suffered a serious geographic dislocation at some point during their lives -- who've had to leave everything behind and move on -- will find it to be seriously inspiring testimony. show less

Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba without their parents during "Operation Peter Pan" between 1960 and 1962. This funny, poignant, sad, insightful, and informative memoir won the National Book Award in 2003 and rightfully so. Carlos was 11 when he and his brother Tony, who was 13, landed in Miami believing that their parents were soon to follow. In the hour flight from Havana, Carlos went from being a privileged fair skinned Cuban boy to being a "spic."

The majority show more of this book is set in Havana where Carlos enjoys a care-free and privileged life with a thick layer of Catholicism and extended family. His father is a eccentric art-collecting judge, his mother a woman with a crippled leg due to polio and dedicated to her children. The antics of Carlos and his brother, Tony, are often hilarious but life is changing as Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1 1959. Suddenly, there is gunfire in the streets, Christmas is made illegal, relatives are imprisoned, and parents are scrambling for ways to protect their children by sending them to the United States.

Eire is an absolutely beautiful writer. Filled with humor, philosophy, and a sprinkling of theology, "Waiting for snow in Havana" provides the reader with a chance to walk in the shoes of a young immigrant who was thrown into a strange new world. Eire is currently a professor of theology at Yale. show less