Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Salsa is an upbeat Latin dance that is easy to learn!..." (more)
Key Phrases: dance position, dance instructor, New York, Los Angeles, Memoir of Salia (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Samantha Dunn, who could be the synthesis of Sophia Loren, Simone De Beauvoir, and Dale Evans, has written an unflinchingly honest and extremely funny memoir. Here we get dance as seduction, dance as sex, and dance as salvation. Faith in Carlos Gomez is a moving and amusing chronicle of love, the loss of love, and the picking up the pieces to a salsa beat. This book is pure joy."
--Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment

Product Description

A writer's all-consuming passion for salsa opens the door to an unexpected world in a nonfiction tale with all the sexiness and humor of the best chick lit

Samantha Dunn is a horsewoman who's not exactly graceful-more comfortable in a barn than in a ballroom. Her introduction to salsa dancing happens by chance in a kitchen during a dinner with a blacksmith from South America. To impress this handsome man on their next date, she decides to take a dance lesson. But then the unpredictable happens: from the first steps, something about the movement and the exotic, sliding music takes hold of her.

From that point on, Dunn throws herself into the salsa culture. She soaks up the Spanish language-an easy feat in her home city of Los Angeles-and begins a peculiar relationship with her dance instructor, a local salsa celebrity. What started off as a lark becomes a quest that reframes her life, changing the way she thinks about her body, her relationships with men and women, her personal history, and even her country. She is hearing tropical rhythms in her head, taking lessons, buying Lycra, and cruising unexplored sections of the vast Southern California metropolis on weeknights in search of the sweaty, packed salsa clubs. And as Latino culture becomes ever more influential in California, she is recognizing the changes in her own life mirrored in the city she thought she knew.

Faith in Carlos Gomez is a story of a woman discovering love-for salsa dancing, for music, for a culture, and for Carlos Gomez-and determined to learn whatever steps she'll need to keep up.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (July 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805080163
• ISBN-13: 978-0805080162
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #444,651 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A passionate invitation to the world of "the dance", August 17, 2005

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Samantha Dunn is addicting. The voluptuous, red-headed journalist --- labeled a combination of Sophia Loren and Dale Evans --- from the sagebrush of the Southwest writes what may be described as the "country" alternative to Candace Bushnell's SEX AND THE CITY. Yet there is a rich, genuine leather to Dunn's narrative that propels and inspires. Dunn has been alluring from her first book, the novel FAILING PARIS, to her first memoir, NOT BY ACCIDENT, when she hilariously and bravely chronicled her recovery from a near-fatal horse-riding accident.

This third offering, FAITH IN CARLOS GOMEZ, takes up where NOT BY ACCIDENT left off. A fully recovered Dunn becomes obsessed with, of all things, salsa music and "the dance." The leap from the stables to the big city dance floors is not so broad considering Dunn's first post-accident conversation with the man who saved her life. Edward Albert Jr. reminds her: "When we were waiting for the paramedics to find us, all of a sudden you asked me why you didn't dance. Do you remember that?"

And the dance begins. On the lookout for the next freelance magazine article, Dunn spots her opportunity when she falls for a South American man. She takes dancing lessons to impress him and to fit in with his crowd, but salsa, she quickly learns, is not square dancing. For the novice, salsa is a struggle. For the committed, salsa is a way of life, a celebration of freedom, a journey toward enlightenment.

Like a new lover, salsa takes over. Dunn writes that it is inside the Conga Room on Wilshire, surrounded outside by the phoniness of Hollywood, watching her partner dance, that: "there seems to hang an acceptance for what we are, this human thing. It comes on me like a religious conversion, the instant of satori talked about in Zen, the line between what came before and all that is possible after, the moment I know I want to inhabit this Los Angeles forever."

While Dunn's highly charged romances with a few Spanish and Latino men are fleeting and unfulfilling (one man even comments: "Women start sleeping with me, and they start thinking they can dance."), it is the dance itself that helps Dunn move into a new stage in her life. The dance is a dramatic though positive addiction; the dance floor is open to self-realization, especially for Dunn, who, in her quest to understand her own origins, learns that it was the dance that flung her mother and her estranged father together for the brief union that brought the author into this world. A passionate invitation to the world Dunn has discovered, FAITH IN CARLOS GOMEZ is another spectacular chapter in the ongoing memoir Dunn weaves of self-discovery and spirituality.

So who is Carlos Gomez? He is an ideal and a mystery, as elusive as a clear definition of the purpose of life. He is a myriad of ideals that make one perfect man. The first Carlos Gomez is an ideal Dunn seeks until she meets the real Carlos Gomez, a C-list actor who foolishly shows little interest in Dunn after their first date. Though he has yet to hold her hand or dance her dance, the perfect Carlos Gomez becomes the salvation for Dunn when one of her closest friends leaves this world of canyons, dances, embraces, sadness and love for that other great mystery we all one day get to solve.

--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sam does it again!, September 14, 2005

By	William L. Bush (Thousand Oaks, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What a joy to read Sam Dunn's wonderful memoir FAITH IN CARLOS GOMEZ!!! The book arrived from Amazon on Saturday and by Saturday evening, my wife had devoured it cover to cover and by the end of the day on Monday, I'd enjoyed every twist, twirl and turn of Sam's adventure. I couldn't put it down!

I really enjoyed the clever way she wove so many elements from her life into the storyline of becoming totally caught up in the Latin culture and salsa dance scene. Great fun to read!

Needless to say, I love the way Sam Dunn writes. I've read her other two books, FAILING PARIS and NOT BY ACCIDENT and after reading this one, all I can say is her stuff gets better and better.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly accurate, July 3, 2007

By	Salsera08 (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

I enjoyed this book. Her depiction of the evolution that a person undergoes when they commit themselves to learning how to dance salsa well was very accurate. I also loved how she accurately depicted the mentality of salseros on the salsa scene. It was dead on!