A spiritual and uplifting look at how Haiti can build on its troubled past to build a brighter future.
A history of Haiti’s long struggle for freedom and civil society.
Milien begins his study of Haiti’s troubled past on a personal note—he recalls putting on his best clothes and attempting to participate in his native land’s first free democratic election in decades, only to have the day dissolve into the infamous violence of the Ruelle Vaillant massacre of 1987. That event led the author to ask one essential question: Why must democracy cost so much in blood? Milien provides a comprehensive tour of Haiti’s past, including its long tenure as a colonial possession worked by African slaves, followed by the 1804 revolution (“which created the world’s first Black republic but also provoked isolation and punishment from the global powers of the time”), the U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934, the Duvalier dictatorship, and the poverty and turmoil of recent years after the nominal establishment of democracy in 1994. Key inflection points are fleshed out, perhaps most crucially the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, when Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled into exile in France. “He took with him millions in stolen state funds and left behind a broken country,” Milien writes, “bruised, impoverished, and desperate for change.” Alongside all these events, the author traces the spiritual practice of vodou, which he points out is usually badly misunderstood outside Haitian society. “To understand Haiti’s democratic struggle, one must understand vodou,” he contends, “not as folklore but as a living force of cultural identity.” He concludes his treatment with a series of prescriptions for Haiti’s future.
Milien’s prose is engaging and unadorned, mostly at the cost of granular detail; no matter what period of Haiti’s history the author addresses, many far more in-depth studies are available to readers wanting more information (the book’s References section isn’t extensive, but it’s a good place to start). The narrative’s greatest strength by far is not historical rigor but rather the evocation of the kind of spiritual resistance the author attributes to vodou. Milien returns regularly to the philosophical underpinnings of national rebirth, applying these precepts to the steps Haiti would need to take in order to strengthen its chances for a brighter future. “What Haiti needs is a moral awakening—a transformation that touches not just laws but lives,” Milien writes. “A return to conscience. A resurrection of the spirit.” He outlines the social pillars that are essential to a working free country, laying out ideas about reforming tax codes, improving schooling, and changing the role of the media, which “must not simply report what is—it must illuminate what could be,” the author writes. “In a land often flooded with bad news, journalism must become a lantern, not just a mirror.” Readers coming to the book hoping for a more in-depth history of Haiti’s history might find the ideological emphasis a bit disappointing, but the defiant optimism Milien expresses about his country’s future—his strong belief that “no obstacle is insurmountable” if the country stays true to its own aspirational past—is the book’s most memorable element.
A spiritual and uplifting look at how Haiti can build on its troubled past to build a brighter future.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798986036441
Page Count: 268
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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