Download or read book The Big Truck That Went By written by Jonathan M. Katz and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle it. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral, authoritative first-hand account, Katz chronicles the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and how the world reacted to a nation in need. More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a monumental response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But three years later the relief effort has foundered. It's most basic promises—to build safer housing for the homeless, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters—remain unfulfilled. The Big Truck That Went By presents a sharp critique of international aid that defies today's conventional wisdom; that the way wealthy countries give aid makes poor countries seem irredeemably hopeless, while trapping millions in cycles of privation and catastrophe. Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid "smarter." With coverage of Bill Clinton, who came to help lead the reconstruction; movie-star aid worker Sean Penn; Wyclef Jean; Haiti's leaders and people alike, Katz weaves a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world's most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti's earthquake, but of the world we live in today.
Download or read book Head Together to Save Haiti written by Jean Charles and published by Gatekeeper Press. This book was released on 2024-08-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Head Together to Save Haiti: Towards the Restoration of an Aborted Independence" delves deeply into Haiti's tumultuous history from its independence in 1804 to the present day. Through a meticulous exploration of key events, influential figures, and the forces that have shaped the destiny of the Haitian nation, this book offers a captivating look at the struggles and triumphs of the Haitian people. The story begins with the historic uprising of Haitian slaves, which led to the proclamation of Haiti's independence as the first free black state in the Americas. However, over the decades, Haiti has faced a series of internal and external challenges, including political turmoil, foreign interventions, and economic crises, which have hindered its progress towards full independence and prosperity. Through detailed accounts, insightful analysis, and poignant testimonies, the book highlights the struggles of the Haitian people to overcome adversity and restore the promise of freedom and dignity for all. It also explores the efforts of reconstruction, reform, and resilience that have shaped Haiti's journey towards a better future. "Head Together to Save Haiti: Towards the Restoration of an Aborted Independence" is much more than a simple historical retrospective; it is a call to action for solidarity, justice, and progress. It is a powerful reminder of the strength and determination of the Haitian people to forge their own destiny and fully realize the ideals of independence and freedom that inspired their historic revolution.
Download or read book Haiti Will Not Perish written by Michael Deibert and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s first independent black republic, Haiti was forged in the fire of history’s only successful slave revolution. Yet more than two hundred years later, the full promise of that revolution – a free country and a free people – remains unfulfilled. Home for more than a decade to one of the world’s largest UN peacekeeping forces, Haiti's tumultuous political culture – buffeted by coups and armed political partisans – combined with economic inequality and environmental degradation to create immense difficulties even before the devastating 2010 earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. This grim tale, however, is not the whole story. In this moving and detailed history, Michael Deibert, who has spent two decades reporting on Haiti, chronicles the heroic struggles of Haitians to build their longed-for country in the face of overwhelming odds. Based on hundreds of interviews with Haitian political leaders, international diplomats, peasant advocates and gang leaders, as well as ordinary Haitians, Deibert’s book provides a vivid, complex and challenging analysis of Haiti’s recent history.
Download or read book Taking Haiti written by Mary A. Renda and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-07-21 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years--and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans--including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.
Download or read book The Spirits and the Law written by Kate Ramsey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vodou has often served as a scapegoat for Haiti’s problems, from political upheavals to natural disasters. This tradition of scapegoating stretches back to the nation’s founding and forms part of a contest over the legitimacy of the religion, both beyond and within Haiti’s borders. The Spirits and the Law examines that vexed history, asking why, from 1835 to 1987, Haiti banned many popular ritual practices. To find out, Kate Ramsey begins with the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. Fearful of an independent black nation inspiring similar revolts, the United States, France, and the rest of Europe ostracized Haiti. Successive Haitian governments, seeking to counter the image of Haiti as primitive as well as contain popular organization and leadership, outlawed “spells” and, later, “superstitious practices.” While not often strictly enforced, these laws were at times the basis for attacks on Vodou by the Haitian state, the Catholic Church, and occupying U.S. forces. Beyond such offensives, Ramsey argues that in prohibiting practices considered essential for maintaining relations with the spirits, anti-Vodou laws reinforced the political marginalization, social stigmatization, and economic exploitation of the Haitian majority. At the same time, she examines the ways communities across Haiti evaded, subverted, redirected, and shaped enforcement of the laws. Analyzing the long genealogy of anti-Vodou rhetoric, Ramsey thoroughly dissects claims that the religion has impeded Haiti’s development.
Download or read book Fixing Haiti written by Jorge Heine and published by United Nations University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haiti may well be the only country in the Americas with a last name. References to the land of the "black Jacobins" are almost always followed by the phrase "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere". To that dubious distinction, on 12 January 2010 Haiti added another, when it was hit by the most devastating natural disaster in the Americas, a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake. More than 220,000 people lost their lives and much of its vibrant capital, Port-au-Prince, was reduced to rubble. Since 2004, the United Nations has been in Haiti through MINUSTAH, in an ambitious attempt to help Haiti raise itself by its bootstraps. This effort has now acquired additional urgency. Is Haiti a failed state? Does it deserve a Marshall-plan-like program? What will it take to address the Haitian predicament? In this book, some of the world's leading experts on Haiti examine the challenges faced by the first black republic, the tasks undertaken by the UN, and the new role of hemispheric players like Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as that of Canada, France and the United States.
Download or read book There Is No More Haiti written by Greg Beckett and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not just another book about crisis in Haiti. This book is about what it feels like to live and die with a crisis that never seems to end. It is about the experience of living amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster. It is about how catastrophic events and political and economic forces shape the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In this gripping account, anthropologist Greg Beckett offers a stunning ethnographic portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in Port-au-Prince in the twenty-first century. Drawing on over a decade of research, There Is No More Haiti builds on stories of death and rebirth to powerfully reframe the narrative of a country in crisis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Haiti today.
Download or read book Haiti written by Elizabeth Abbott and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a journalist and family insider, “the most intimate and revealing examination to date” of the Duvaliers and their Haitian legacy. (Publishers Weekly) Recounts the depredations and corruption of the Duvalier regime in Haiti, from the election of Papa Duvalier in 1957 to the exile of his son, Jean Claude. Written by the senior editor of the Haiti Times and the sister-in-law of Baby Doc’s successor, this account details the excesses of the dictatorship and the grim state in which the Duvaliers left the country when the regime was finally overthrown. “History with a human face, effective, moving, written with surprising and admirable restraint.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Tent Life written by Edwidge Danticat and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the images in Tent Life: Haiti document the makeshift tent communities that Haitians have been forced to live in to survive. Gallery visited Haiti with seven other artists from New York, who all volunteered their time and talents to bring smiles to Haitians while photographing and filming their heartbreaking story. These portraits communicate the resilience, dignity and strength of the Haitian people surviving, living, working and vehemently not waiting for others to determine their fate.
Download or read book Hope for Haiti written by Jesse Joshua Watson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the dust settled on Port-au-Prince, hope was the last thing anybody could see. When the earth shook, his whole neighborhood disappeared. Now a boy and his mother are living in the soccer stadium, in a shelter made of tin and bedsheets, with long lines for food and water. But even with so much sorrow all around, he finds a child playing with a soccer ball made of rags. Soon many children are caught up in the magic of the game that transports them out of their bleak surroundings and into a world where anything is possible. Then the kids are given a truly wonderful gift. A soccer ball might seem simple, but really it's a powerful link between a heartbroken country's past and its hopes for the future. Jesse Joshua Watson has created an inspiring testament to the strength of the Haitian people and the promise of children.
Download or read book Haiti Noir Akashic Noir written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haiti has had a tragic history and continues to be on of the most destitute places on the planet, especially in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Here, however, editor Edwidge Danticat reveals that even while the subject matter remains dark, the calibre of Haitian writing is of the highest order. Features stories by Edwidge Danticat, Madison Smartt Bell, Gary Victor, Jessica Fievre, Marilene Phipps, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Katie Ulysse, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, Kettly Mars, Rodney Saint-Eloi and many more.
Download or read book Tropics of Haiti written by Marlene L. Daut and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary history of the Haitian Revolution that explores how scientific ideas about ‘race’ affected 19th-century understandings of the Haitian Revolution and, conversely, how understandings of the Haitian Revolution affected 19th-century scientific ideas about race.
Download or read book Damming the Flood written by Peter Hallward and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before a devastating earthquake hit in January 2010, Haiti was one of the most impoverished and oppressed countries in the world. However, in the late 1980s a remarkable popular mobilization known as Lavalas ("the flood") sought to liberate the island from decades of US-backed dictatorial rule. Damming the Flood analyzes how and why the Lavalas governments led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were overthrown, in 1991 and again in 2004, by the enemies of democracy in Haiti and abroad. The elaborate campaign to suppress Lavalas was perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War. It has left the people of Haiti at the mercy of some of the most rapacious political and economic forces on the planet. Updated with a substantial new afterword that addresses the international response to the earthquake, Damming the Flood is both an invaluable account of recent Haitian history and an illuminating analysis of twenty-first-century imperialism.
Download or read book Democratic Insecurities written by Erica Caple James and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratic Insecurities focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti during and after Haiti's 1991 coup. In this remarkable ethnography of violence, Erica Caple James explores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experiences were denied by U.S. officials and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers. Using vivid first-person accounts from women survivors, James raises important new questions about humanitarian aid, structural violence, and political insecurity. She discusses the politics of postconflict assistance to Haiti and the challenges of promoting democracy, human rights, and justice in societies that experience chronic insecurity. Similarly, she finds that efforts to promote political development and psychosocial rehabilitation may fail because of competition, strife, and corruption among the individuals and institutions that implement such initiatives.
Download or read book Rainy Season written by Amy Wilentz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered the best book ever written about Haiti, now updated with a New Introduction, “After the Earthquake,” features first hand-reporting from Haiti weeks after the 2010 earthquake. Through a series of personal journeys, each interwoven with scenes from Haiti’s extraordinary past, Amy Wilentz brings to life this turbulent and fascinating country. Opening with her arrival just days before the fall of Haiti’s President-for-Life, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Wilentz captures a country electric with the expectation of change: markets that bustle by day explode with gunfire at night; outlaws control country roads; farmers struggle to survive in a barren land; and belief in voodoo and the spirits of the ancestors remains as strong as ever. The Rainy Season demystifies Haiti—a country and a people in cruel and capricious times. From the rebel priest Father Aristide and the street boys under his protection to the military strongmen who pass through the revolving door of power into the gleaming white presidential palace—and the buzzing international press corps members who jet in for a coup and leave the minute it’s over—Wilentz’s Haiti haunts the imagination.
Download or read book My Soul Is in Haiti written by Bertin M. Louis, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally, by studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. In the Haitian diaspora, as in Haiti itself, the majority of Haitians have long practiced Catholicism or Vodou. However, Protestant forms of Christianity now flourish both in Haiti and beyond. In the Bahamas, where approximately one in five people are now Haitian-born or Haitian-descended, Protestantism has become the majority religion for immigrant Haitians. In My Soul Is in Haiti, Bertin M. Louis, Jr. has combined multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, Haiti, and the Bahamas with a transnational framework to analyze why Protestantism has appealed to the Haitian diaspora community in the Bahamas. The volume illustrates how devout Haitian Protestant migrants use their religious identities to ground themselves in a place that is hostile to them as migrants, and it also uncovers how their religious faith ties in to their belief in the need to “save” their homeland, as they re-imagine Haiti politically and morally as a Protestant Christian nation. This important look at transnational migration between second and third world countries shows how notions of nationalism among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas are filtered through their religious beliefs. By studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas, Louis offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally.
Download or read book Medicine and Morality in Haiti written by Paul Brodwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morality and medicine are inextricably intertwined in rural Haiti, and both are shaped by the different local religious traditions, Christian and Vodoun, as well as by biomedical and folk medical practices. When people fall ill, they seek treatment not only from Western doctors but also from herbalists, religious healers and midwives. Dr Brodwin examines the situational logic, the pragmatic decisions, that guide people in making choices when they are faced with illness. He also explains the moral issues that arise in a society where suffering is associated with guilt, but where different, sometimes conflicting, ethical systems coexist. Moreover, he shows how in the crisis of illness people rework religious identities and are forced to address fundamental social and political problems.
