Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen--immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material.

Drawing on her 30-year career as a one of the nation's leading sculpture and architectural conservators, the award-winning author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub Rosa Lowinger employs the art and chemistry of art conservation to tell the stories of objects and places people value, and how we manage their deterioration, restoration, and loss.

Having worked in places as far flung as Havana, Miami, Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Port-Au-Prince, Cuban-born Lowinger also writes of the immigrant's journey to find roots in an America that is rapidly changing, and coming to terms with parents whose fraught personalities were shaped by loss of their country and way of life.