Author (and Progressive Book Club editorial board member) Edwidge Danticat  was born in Haiti’s capital city Port-au-Prince. In this clip, from NPR’s All Things Considered program, she reads an excerpt from her book After the Dance recalling a carnival in another earthquake-devastated city there, Jacmel (pictured above). (Listen here.)

Danticat has spent the last few days on the phone trying to locate family members in Haiti, with limited success, an experience she describes in this NPR interview. (I’m terrified that [the news] promises to be very, very grim indeed.”)

She also found time to recommend to the Wall Street Journal “some books and music that people who are interested in Haitian history and arts should seek out in order to place the current disaster in a broader context.” They are:

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, by Amy Wilentz
Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Boukman Eksperyans (music)
Ram (music)

More detail on each at the Journal’s “Speakeasy” blog.

Danticat has herself written several stories and novels, and most recently a memoir, about Haiti, including:

Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel)
Krik? Krak! (stories)
The Farming of Bones (novel)
Brother, I’m Dying (memoir/social criticism)

The Daily Beast and its contributors have a list of recommend books (and a documentary) that will help readers understand Haiti. It includes:

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by Amy Wilentz
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

(Read the full list at The Daily Beast.)

Note: The image above is taken from the cover of The Rainy Season by Amy Wilentz (Simon & Schuster).

In the following excerpt from his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond takes on the question of why Haiti seems to have it so tough compared to its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. (Via The Guardian)

Why did the political, economic and ecological histories of the Dominican Republic andHaiti – two countries that share the same island – unfold so differently? Part of the answer involves environmental differences.

Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth. Hispaniola’s highest mountains (more than 10,000ft) are on the Dominican side and the rivers from those mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side. This has broad valleys, plains and plateaus and much thicker soils. In particular, the Cibao valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world.

In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east. Compared to the Dominican Republic, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture is much smaller. There is more limestone terrain and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery.

Note the paradox. The Haitian side of the island was less well-endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. Haiti’s wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. Haiti’s elite identified strongly with France rather than with their own landscape and sought to extract wealth from the peasants. The lesson, in effect, is that an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cash flow.

While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation involves social and political differences. One of these involves the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in its overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was itself in economic and political to decline.

Hence France could and did invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island.

France also imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbour during colonial times – and it still has a somewhat larger population today. But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double its neighbour’s population density.

The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic – with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry – was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contri buted to the country’s development. The people of the Dominican Republic even chose to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821 and its president chose to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.

Still another social difference contributing to the different economies is that – as a legacy of their country’s slave history and slave revolt – most Haitians owned their own land, used it to feed themselves and received no help from their government in developing cash crops for trade with over seas European countries. The Dominican Republic, however, eventually did develop an export economy and overseas trade.

Finally, Haiti’s problems of de forestation and poverty have become compounded within the last 40 years. The Dominican Republic retained much forest cover and began to industrialise. It launched a crash programme to spare forest use for fuel by instead importing propane and liquefied natural gas. But Haiti’s poverty forced its people to remain dependent on forest-derived charcoal from fuel, thereby accelerating the destruction of its last remaining forests.

Extracted from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, published by Penguin.

© Jared Diamond 2005.

Don’t miss Tracy Kidder’s op-ed today on Haiti in the New York Times. Kidder is of course the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of many books, most recently Strength in What Remains and, before that, a book about Haiti, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Here are the key paragraphs.

[A]t least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country.

But that is only part of the problem. In the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve.

The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from corruption, doesn’t hold — all the more reason, indeed, to work with the government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise. (Read the full article.)

Relatedly, the idea that many aid many projects seem designed to serve not their ostensible recipients but the interests of the people administering the projects is developed at book length by former Wall Street Journal reporters Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow in Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. The book, which focuses on Africa, lays bare how American, British, and European policies and, too often, the work of well-intentioned aid groups have combined to keep that continent hungry. (Learn more about Enough here.)

Lastly, to donate to help earthquake relief efforts in Haiti via this Tracy Kidder-approved link.

In his important new book, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, James Hogan describes in disturbing detail a problem that continues to cause headaches for the scientific community: those who claim in the false name of science that global warming isn’t a problem at all.

As the book illustrates, these climate change deniers are no idle threat. Despite flimsy credentials and hollow arguments, such fringe advocates are richly funded by oil companies and industrial interests and too often appear as “experts” on cable news shows under the guise of balance.

Issues of integrity on climate science have been in the spotlight recently after a several hacked e-mail threads between leading climatologists were leaked to the press. While the messages offer nothing to contradict the consensus science on climate change, doubters have seized on unseemly language therein to suggest mainstream scientists are intentionally deceiving the public. The claims may have had an impact. A CNN/Opinion Research poll taken weeks after the e-mails were leaked shows 45 percent of Americans now believe global warming is a proven fact and man-made, down from 56 percent two years ago.

To help readers and cable news viewers spot a phony climate expert when they run across one, Hogan advises asking the following basic questions. A comprehensive guide to exposed climate change deniers can be found at DeSmogBlog.com, cofounded by the author.

1. Does this person have relevant credentials? Have they trained in an area of science that is at least connected to climatology or atmospheric physics?
2. If this person is talking about science, are they practicing science? Are they currently conducting research or publishing in peer-reviewed journals? Or do their views appear primarily on newspaper opinion pages?
3. Who is paying this person? Does this person have connections to think tanks or industries that will benefit from preempting climate change legislation?

Last week, drawing on Rich Benjamin’s important book Searching for Whitopia, we published a map of America’s Extreme Whitopias. As promised, the follow up includes a comprehensive listing of what Benjamin calls “Whitopian Counties”.

In contrast to the Extreme Whitopias (which are at least 90% non-Hispanic white; with a total population growth of at least 10%; and with at least 75% of that growth coming from non-Hispanic whites), Whitopian Counties are at least 85% non-Hispanic white, with total population growth of at least 7% after 2000, and with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from non-Hispanic Whites.

See if your hometown made the list!
View Whitopian County in a larger map

Check out these videos of author and journalist Rich Benjamin promoting his new book Searching For Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, which explores the social and political implications of the startling rise of “Whitopias”—small towns and exurbs without diversity.

Benjamin’s book covers a wide range of topics, from illegal immigration to unfair housing practices, as he travels to and from white enclaves in the heart of America.  His journey is filled with moments of humor and insight, as he holds up a mirror to America as it’s shaping up in the 21st century.

(More about Searching for Whitopia.)

Via the publisher:

Via Time.com

Via PressTV (in 3 parts)

From Democracy Now!: Since President Obama’s election, there’s been a surge in hate crimes, political murders, and assassination threats, and extreme rhetoric in this country, and right-wing militias are on the rise in several states. Independent filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen go inside the white nationalist movement to file an exclusive report.

For more on right-wing hate groups and the poisonous ideas that animate them, check out The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right by David Neiwert.

To follow up on an earlier post, here’s an excerpt from Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her intimate relationship with the photographer Robert Mappelthorpe in 1960s New York.

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

From Chapter 1

Monday’s Children

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.

The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.

The swan became one with the sky. I struggled to find words to describe my own sense of it. Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds.

Read More

New from Book TV: Gail Collins, the first woman to have held the post of Editorial Page Editor of the New York Times, talks about her book When Everything Changed, with Gwen Ifill of the PBS Newshour. The book chronicles the amazing journey of American women from 1960s, when a woman could be publicly berated for showing up to a courthouse in slacks and had to get bank loans in her husbands’ name, to the present day. (More about Gail Collins and When Everything Changed.)