Amy Wilentz brings to life a turbulent and fascinating country, Haiti, through a series of personal journeys, interwoven with scenes from the country's extraordinary past. Opening with her arrival in 1986, days before the ousting of Haiti's President for Life, Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, Wilentz captures a country electric with the expectation of change. She then shows how that hope turned to disappointment when liberation led not to reform, but to chaos and stagnation. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, Wilentz leads us through the streets, bustling by day, and by night filled with gunfire and burning tyres. We explore a countryside where young soldiers control road-blocks and farmers struggle to survive, and where belief in voodoo is as strong as it ever was. Wilentz offers vivid portraits of today's Haitians - Father Aristide the rebel priest and spiritual force behind the opposition; the various military-backed leaders who have passed through Haiti's revolving door of power; the wild kids who roam the streets - and the foreigners in Haiti: the State Department men; the Christian missionaries; the international press corps who jet in for each coup.
In the tradition of Joan Didion and Paul Theroux, The Rainy Season is modern reportage of great resonance and beauty.
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Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 154 mm
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ISBN-13
978-0-224-02563-8 (9780224025638)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Amy Wilentz graduated from Harvard in 1976. She worked as an assistant literary then political editor at The Nation, moved on to the literary quarterly Grand Street as associate editor, then to Newsday and most recently to Time magazine where she worked as a staff writer. Her interest in Haiti began when she read Graham Greene's The Comedians. In early 1986, Wilentz saw that Duvalier's regime was seriously threatened - she took one of the last planes to go into Haiti before the dictator left, and started writing The Rainy Season.
