Farewell, Fred Voodoo - 9781451644074

Compared by critics to Joan Didion and V.S. Naipaul, this brilliant writer’s account of a long, painful, ecstatic—and unreciprocated—affair with a country that has long fascinated the world received ecstatic reviews.

Haiti emerged from the dust of the 2010 earthquake like a powerful spirit, and this stunning book describes the country’s day-to-day struggle and its relationship to outsiders who come to help out. There are human rights reporters gone awry, movie stars turned aid workers, priests and musicians running for president, doctors turned diplomats. A former US president works as a house builder and voodoo priests try to control elections.

Wilentz traces Haiti’s history from its slave plantations through its turbulent revolution, its kick-up-the-dirt guerrilla movements, its totalitarian dynasty that ruled for decades, and its long and always troubled relationship with the United States. Yet through a history of hardship shines Haiti’s creative culture—its African traditions, its French inheritance, and its uncanny resilience, a strength that is often confused with resignation.

A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes, over time and in the pages of this book, a lover of Haiti, pursuing the essence of this beautiful and confounding land into its darkest and brightest corners. Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a spiritual journey into the heart of the human soul, and Haiti has found in Amy Wilentz an author of astonishing wit, sympathy, and eloquence.