Having read "Musica!....." I am dismayed at the customer reviews I just read praising this work. To the reviewer who wrote "this is the book I've been waiting for" I suggest you keep waiting or look to some less flashy, sexy works for correct information (try Manuel's (Carribean Currents") because you won't find much of it here. The reviewer who "wants to know a bit more about the history" will find just that--only "a bit more." But don't trust that the bit more you find will be correct. I wish the reviewer who said this work was "surely the product of painstaking research" were right, but the research is, at best, shoddy. Journalists (and Ms. Steward is one) are accustomed to fact-checking their work or having it done for them. This work was not fact-checked. Open this book to nearly any page and one can find one error after another. The errors are either of a factual nature that any journalist concerned with fact can check, or of an interpretative nature but which are presented as fact. The great salsero (and so much more) Willie Colon who wrote the forword to this work is presented as having been born and raised in Brooklyn. Mr. Colon has always been from the Bronx, is very self-identified as a Bronxite and even ran for public office from the Bronx. This is not some fuzzy concept open to interpretation. If the author can't even get right the simplest, most public fact about one of the most well-known salseros whom she got to write her forword, what can we possibly trust about any of her other information? In another glaring example, Ms. Steward refers to NY born and raised Puerto Rican percussionist Steve Berrios as a marielito (Cuban who came to the US from Mariel, Cuba in the early 1980s) who, she claims, as a young man in Cuba secretely listen to the presumably banned US jazz. This musician was never a young man in Cuba and all it takes is 5 seconds of listening to him talk to know he is a born and bred hard-core New Yorker. The interpretative information is equally subject to question, including who "invented" mambo, who recorded the first mambo, what constitutes the ensemble for PR plena music, etc. Additionally, the author mis-identifies people in many of the photos. And in talking about Abakua, an African religion still practiced in Cuba, the author clains the "costume looks like a flamboyant version of Ku Klux Klan dress." Is it possible to be more offensive to a people of African descent than to claim their ritual dress resembles that of the oldest hate group in the Americas? In summary, this is a very disappointing work given the money that backed such a glitzy tome and the potential it had for filling a gaping hole in the popular literature about this music. But even worse, it is a DANGEROUS work in that what Ms. Steward has written will become accepted as historical fact by unsuspecting people who know little or nothing and sincerely want to learn something.
