Overwhelmed with the pain of a failed fifteen-year relationship, Camille Cusumano wanted badly to escape her life and heal her emotional wounds. After a violent encounter with her ex’s new girlfriend, Camille decided she had some serious soul-searching to do. She took off for Buenos Aires intending to stay a few short weeks, but when her search for inner peace met with her true passion of tango, she realized she’d need to stay in Argentina indefinitely.
Tango is a memoir of falling in love with a country through the dance that embodies intensity, freedom, and passion — all pivotal to Camille’s own process of self-discovery. From the charm of local barrios to savory empanadas, Camille whole-heartedly embraces the ardent culture of Argentina, and soon a month-long escape turns into a year-long personal odyssey. Slowly letting go of her grief through a blend of tango, Zen, and a burgeoning group of friends, Camille discovers that her fierceness and patience can exist in harmony as she learns how to survive in style when love falls apart.
Tango is a memoir of falling in love with a country through the dance that embodies intensity, freedom, and passion — all pivotal to Camille’s own process of self-discovery. From the charm of local barrios to savory empanadas, Camille whole-heartedly embraces the ardent culture of Argentina, and soon a month-long escape turns into a year-long personal odyssey. Slowly letting go of her grief through a blend of tango, Zen, and a burgeoning group of friends, Camille discovers that her fierceness and patience can exist in harmony as she learns how to survive in style when love falls apart.
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Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Tango has been the subject of several recent books, from Marina Palmer's Kiss and Tango to Irene D. Thomas and Larry M. Sawyer's The Temptation To Tango to Robert Farris Thompson's Tango: The Art History of Love. Cookbook author and novelist Cusumano, as her web site (www.camillecusumano.com) declares, "is a writer who dances tango," and here she recounts her journey toward self-awareness set in the context of an extraordinary year spent in Buenos Aires. According to Cusumano, tango—like yoga and Zen, which she also practices—is a way of life, and her keen and colorful observations of everything from the milongas (tango dance halls) and her dance wardrobe to the people she met and danced with to the neighborhoods she lived in and the foods she ate create a thoughtful account redolent with the sights, sounds, and tastes of her own tango experience. Cusumano's book is recommended for public library collections serving dancers, armchair travelers, and literary-essay fans.—Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago P.L.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
"According to Cusumano, tango—like yoga and Zen, which she also practices—is a way of life, and her keen and colorful observations of everything from the milongas (tango dance halls) and her dance wardrobe to the people she met and danced with to the neighborhoods she lived in and the foods she ate create a thoughtful account redolent with the sights, sounds, and tastes of her own tango experience."
—Library Journal
—Library Journal
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More About the Author
I was born in New Jersey, in a big Sicilian family. I moved to San Francisco in 1973. I wanted to be a travel writer. Because of my love of food, I became a food writer first. Then a travel writer. I've lived abroad twice--in France, in 1976, where I did some graduate work. And most recently, I spent the last year and a half in Buenos Aires, a place I never expected to like so much---but tango took hold of me, and there I found myself, dancing away. The book contract came after I was there six months and realized I had a story to tell.And so I did, in Tango, an Argentine Love Story.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Try a New Dance, Lance,
By
This review is from: Tango: An Argentine Love Story (Paperback)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book proves the reverse may also be true---words can be as richly evocative as any image. TANGO's words march across the page like vivid snapshots. It takes you deep inside the culture of the dance, of Buenos Aires, a very Italian city, to exotic corners of Argentina, like Iguazu and Patagonia, to gaucho country, and barrios (or neighborhoods) all over Buenos Aires. It never lacks for some visual detail to keep your kinesthetic interest--whether the author is describing tango dancers in La Boca who dip their soles in paint and dance on a huge canvas or what the exotic parts of Argentine cattle taste like or what her many dance partners smell like--(be thankful it's not scratch-and-sniff). Be prepared for every known sense and some not yet named to be aroused when you read TANGO, a love story with many facets. The book opens when life takes some unexpected turns, and the author rises to the challenge. She packs up a few suitcases and with only a bare bones plan, takes off for Buenos Aires, Tango Mecca, Paris of South America, a city that never sleeps. Her love life has fallen apart, the gauntlet is thrown. That's the bad news. It's also where the good news starts. She shows how we all rise from the ashes, new life is always on the bud. There are a thousand and one ways to redeem ourselves. Just hop on the bus, Gus. Slip out the back, Jack. Try a new dance, Lance. TANGO is a story about sudden travel---not the carefully planned sort--- to a foreign place literally and figuratively. That is, sometimes that foreign place is our self. The author is never at a loss for finding the hidden psychological/spiritual meaning in the mundane: her residual Oedipal complex in a partner's torso, the double meaning of tango's precept that we maintain our own "axis" in tango. Everything goes many layers deep. Indeed tango is more than a dance, it's a metaphor for everything in life, from internal conflict to external peace. TANGO, the "love" story, is occasionally about ordinary romance between a man and woman; it has forays into sexual love as well as Platonic idealized love with strangers you meet in a specially designated place for tango, called a milonga, whom you may never see again, who "come and go like ripples in a stream." It is also about love beyond the conventional man/woman type. It's about love in a community of people who share a passion, in this case for a dance and its music, which have survived more than a hundred years through much, including Argentina's last military dictatorship prohibition of public gatherings. It is also about the kind of self discovery and bliss that occur when you give yourself over completely to anything that you love and that requires total presence. The writing is an exercise in the glorification of the commonplace--- a rundown rickety old monastery, a dying cat, the milonga itself, all play out poetically in the author's experience. For this reason, at times it reads like a well-crafted novel. But even the author admits that, after all, tango is just a dance and she guides the reader to understanding that the rapture and bliss she derives from tango is everyone's birthright: "Every `body' has got tango," she writes. You don't have to know a thing about the dance to enjoy this book. And if you do, you'll love it because it offers a measure of one woman's multi-faceted experience and interpretation, against which to measure your own or another's. There is so much to ponder and take away---one of my favorite chapters is called Church of Tango, one in which there is very little tango, but a lot to contemplate. TANGO is pure lyricism. Go learn a few steps in a class, but then pick up TANGO and experience tango like you never have and never will on a dance floor. Then, realize that all your life, every action, reaction, interaction, is tango, a dance between two forces, two polarities--the true currency of life. Savor it, savor it--just like the dance---in total presence.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delicious read,
By
This review is from: Tango: An Argentine Love Story (Paperback)
This book was a delicious read, well written and satisfying on many levels. For starters, it is my favorite kind of travel writing because it penetrates the underlying character of a place and its people, in this case Buenos Aires and the world of tango. But the book is also an absorbing story of the author's personal journey, one in which she heals her troubled soul/heart as she toggles between the pursuits of tango and zen meditation. Her exploration into these two mind-body disciplines and the bridge she finds between them is fascinating. Occasionally she tosses out nuggets of hard won wisdom that she extracts from both, but never takes herself too seriously. She is in fact quite funny with her self-deprecating humor. Yet when she talks of others she does so in a spirit of kindness and generosity.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting at times...,
By Mist (Traveling) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tango: An Argentine Love Story (Paperback)
This book is a very quick read, and I must say that it kept me wanting to read it all the way through. I loved every bit of the book that was about dancing and Buenos Aires. I absolutely love Argentina, and reading this book was like re-visiting my time there. On the downside, this book is the typical type of "memoir" that has recently become popular where someone has a unique experience, then decides to write about it (Eat, Pray, Love is the perfect example of this, and I thought that book was nearly worthless). I think there has to be some level of egotism involved to think that others would want to read about your experience, and that ego often shows up in an annoying sort of way in the book. As other reviewers pointed out, the author is a bit excessive in her self-praise. Clearly, she is a good dancer, but it would have been much more enjoyable to read if this part had been understated. I admit I don't know much about the whole Zen thing, but I always thought modesty was an important part of that way of thinking. The combination of these two (ego vs. Zen)makes for an incongruous narrative.
My three-star rating refers only to the book, and not my complaint here, but I also want to warn other customers that if you are buying this as a bargain book, you may not receive a book that looks very nice (important if you're buying it as a gift). This is probably the first time I've been disappointed in Amazon, but my book arrived looking like it had been buried in the dirt for awhile. The front and back cover had some kind of greasy dirty stuff all over, and the cover is peeling back from itself. Yes, sometimes you get what you pay for, but this book in no way seems new as it is supposed to be.
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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sin rumbo, tango music, dancing tango, tango dancers, fellow dancers Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Juan Carlos, Salon Canning, New Jersey, Niño Bien, San Antonio, New York, United States, Club Español, San Telmo, Christy Cote, Rio de la Plata, Carlos Di Sarli, Avenida de Mayo, Puerto Madero, Milonga Triste, Confitería Ideal, Dirty War, Carlos Gardel, South America, World War, North American, Tango Negro, Los Consagrados Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
sin rumbo, tango music, dancing tango, tango dancers, fellow dancers Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Juan Carlos, Salon Canning, New Jersey, Niño Bien, San Antonio, New York, United States, Club Español, San Telmo, Christy Cote, Rio de la Plata, Carlos Di Sarli, Avenida de Mayo, Puerto Madero, Milonga Triste, Confitería Ideal, Dirty War, Carlos Gardel, South America, World War, North American, Tango Negro, Los Consagrados Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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