This is easily the most expansive and detailed history of Cuba I've read, but while there's not really any extraneous information in here, it is incredibly dense. I had to read this in a week for a seminar class and that is NOT how I would recommend going about it. There's just so much detail that having to read and absorb all of it quickly in a short period of time doesn't work very well. I'd space it out over the course of a month or so; all the history is valuable but there's just a LOT of it. Gott's writing style is fairly fluid for a history piece (although there's a lot of nostalgic description of places at the beginning of nearly every section or chapter), and while his sympathies for Castro and the Revolution are clear he remains mostly unbiased throughout the book and provides a great comprehensive history of the island.

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