Program Type:
Book Club- Registration is required for this event.
- Registration is no longer available for this event.
Program Description
Event Details
The Coronado Public Library's Best of the Best Book Club meets regularly on the 4th Wednesday of each month to discuss books that have won major awards. Receive reminder emails about our meeting by registering below. Registration is not required.
For our September meeting, we will discuss the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, a novel that recreates the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life.
Place this title on hold via our online catalog, or check out the e-book through the CloudLibrary app.
About The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to the grand stage of New York City. It is the era of mambo, and the Castillo brothers, workers by day, become stars of the dance halls by night, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth, exuberance, love, and freedom―a golden time that decades later is remembered with nostalgia and deep affection.
Hijuelos's portrait of the Castillo brothers, their families, their fellow musicians and lovers, their triumphs and tragedies, recreates the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life.
Exuberantly celebrated from the moment it was published in 1989, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990 (making Hijuelos the first Hispanic recipient of the award). It remains a perennial bestseller, and the story's themes of cultural fusion and identity are as relevant today as they were over 30 years ago, proving Hijuelos's novel to be a genuine and timeless classic.
About Oscar Hijuelos
Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013), a native New Yorker and the son of Cuban immigrants, was a Pulitzer Prize winning author of nine novels and a memoir and a recipient of the Rome Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He became the first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990 for his international bestseller The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and his novels have been translated into more than 40 languages.