Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Ms. Guillermoprieto has written a memoir that is highly skeptical of the act of remembering. Some of what she tells is no doubt "completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now."

They do not sound best; they present painfully "the inept young woman I was." This may win a share of our trust. More is won by the writer's trained skepticism even toward an effort so much her own that, despite her perfect published English, she has written it in Spanish. As a journalist she has disentangled too many botched and elided memories not to know that "this was" must always be less truthful than "this may have been."

-- From Richard Eder's review of Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir Dancing with Cuba, published in today's NY Times.