Faith In Carlos Gomez: A Memoir Of Salsa, Sex And Salvation

By Samantha Dunn

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805080163
• ISBN13: 9780805080162
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

I'VE GIVEN THIS BOOK TO FIVE DIFFERENT FRIENDS

I loved this book so much - it's well written, insightful, and fun. I read the whole memoir in one sitting - I simply could not put it down! It's rich in metaphor and meaning: a must read!

when can I start?

When I read Sam Dunn's fabulous book, I felt exhiliarated -- not only was the writing so exciting, but she made me feel as if I, too, could be sexy, wild, a salsa dancer, maybe (despite being the much-harried mother of three children). Her writing is both vulnerable and wise, poignant and clear-headed -- I read the memoir in one sitting and then went to buy her other books.

This book is a gem!

I bought Faith in Carlos Gomez because it was selected by my book club for March, but I've already plowed through it and just ordered the author's other two books! For some reason, I was expecting a book about the life of a dancer, but the salsa world is merely a colorful backdrop for this heartfelt, lyrical, wildly funny book about one woman's search for love, identity and understanding. You will love this book if you've ever searched for love in all the wrong faces, lusted after a gorgeous stranger, found understanding in unforeseen places. SPOILER ALERT!!! There is an unexpected chapter about love and loss that will leave you in a puddle on the floor. I loved it!!

A passionate invitation to the world of "the dance"

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 thei