Brazilian mysteries and Cuban metaphors

Posted Aug 8, 2008 by Kevin Walker

Updated Aug 8, 2008 at 10:32 AM

Americans and the Brits aren’t the only ones with great crime series. Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Inspector Espinoza series keeps going this summer with Blackout, in which Espinoza looks into the murder of a one-legged homeless man found shot through the heart in Rio de Janeiro. Like all great mysteries, it comes with an abundance of twists and turns.

Two nonfiction books slated for release next week also look interesting. One is Cuba In the American Imagination by Louis A. Perez Jr., a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Perez examines “the popular metaphors and motifs used by Americans in popular narratives to depict the relationship between Cuba and the United States.”

Also, In Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures, author Cynthia Saltzman (an art history graduate from Harvard and Berkeley) describes the “cutthroat world of art collecting during the Gilded Age,”