Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Travel & holiday
Weblink
www.amywilentz.com

FAREWELL, FRED VOODOO

Amy Wilentz

A Letter from Haiti

A brilliant writer’s account of a long, painful, ecstatic—and unreciprocated—affair with a country that has long fascinated the world.

It was no surprise to Amy Wilentz when Haiti emerged from the dust of the 2010 earthquake like a powerful spirit. Her book is about magical transformations. It is filled with raucous characters: human-rights reporters gone awry, movie stars turned into aid workers, musicians running for president, doctors turned into diplomats, a former U.S. president working as a house builder, street boys morphing into rock stars, and voodoo priests running elections. Wilentz looks back and forward at the country: at its slave plantations, its unthinkable revolutionary history, its kick-up-the-dirt guerrilla movements, its troubled relationship to the U.S., the totalitarian dynasty that ruled for decades, as well as its creative culture, its ancient African traditions and attitudes, and its uncanny resilience.
Like Joan Didion’s Salvador and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, this book vividly portrays the people of a stark place. A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes, over time and in the pages of this book, a lover of this country, pursuing the heart and soul of this beautiful and confounding place into the darkest and brightest corners.

Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, of Martyrs‘ Crossinq, (a novel) and of 1 Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She has won the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award; in 1990, she was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She writes tor The New Vorker and The Nation and teaches in the Literary Journalism program at U.C. Irvine.

Available products
Book Published 2013-01-01 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2013-01-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Farewell, Fred Voodoo is engrossing and gorgeous and funny, a meticulously reported story of love for a maddening place. Wilentz’s writing is so lyrical it’s like hearing a song—in this case, the magical, confounding, sad song of Haiti.

It is no accident that for a procession of great writers Haiti has been the gorgeous obsession—a country of the mind as compelling in its corporeal presence as any on earth. Haiti entangles its visitors in the sheer gorgeousness of its improbabilities, and over the past quarter century, no one has plumbed Haiti more thoroughly, or explored it more passionately, than Amy Wilentz. In Farewell, Fred Voodoo, she embraces that obsession and follows it unflinchingly where it leads, deep into the phantasmagoria of Haiti—and into herself. She has written a beautiful, compelling book.

An extraordinarily frank cultural study/memoir that eschews platitudes of both tragedy and hope.

Excellent and illuminating….a love letter to—and a lament for—Haiti, a country with an already strange and tortured history that became even more tragic, interesting and convoluted in the months after the earthquake…. [Wilentz] brings to Haiti empathy and her great skills as a narrator….it's Wilentz's honesty about her own role in Haiti and that of so many other American visitors to that country that ultimately distinguishes her book most from other works that cover similar terrain. Read more...

At its strongest, her new book, ‘Farewell, Fred Voodoo,’ showcases all her formidable gifts as a reporter: her love of, and intimate familiarity with, Haiti; her sense of historical perspective; and her eye for the revealing detail. Like Joan Didion and V. S. Naipaul, she has an ability not only to provide a visceral, physical feel for a place, but also to communicate an existential sense of what it’s like to be there as a journalist with a very specific and sometimes highly subjective relationship with her subject. Read more...

[Wilentz] loves and knows Haiti deeply, and her stories about her old friends and new neighbors…shows a Haiti different and more complex than the myth created by naive though well-meaning outsiders. Read more...

Amy Wilentz is a brilliant writer, an ace journalist and, perhaps most important, she is not an outsider. She's the perfect guide through the heartbreak and beauty of post-earthquake Haiti. I was gripped by her respectful and first-hand reporting on Voodoo, and impressed by her enormous sensitivity to the crushing deprivation most Haitians endure.

She was there when Baby Doc fled; she was there, decades later, just after the earthquake hit. Amy Wilentz knows Haiti deeply: its language, its tragic history, the foibles of her fellow Americans who often miss the story there. This makes her a wise, wry, indispensable guide to a country whose fate has long been so interwoven with our own.

Farewell, Fred Voodoo is written with authority and great affection for Haiti and Haitians and for some of the people who are trying to help them. An informative and wonderful piece of writing, it is a work of considerable artistry, immensely evocative. I read it with pleasure and with mounting gratitude.

[A] bracing memoir…Readers get a stimulating immersion course in Haiti’s culture, history, and political machinations. [Wilentz] introduces a fantastical cast of characters who inhabit the many layers of Haitian society and those individuals who flocked to the island following the earthquake, burdened with motives ranging from the base self-promotion or redemption of sundry celebrities…An unsentimental yet heartfelt journey to a country possessing the power to baffle some, yet beguile others.

I can't imagine there's a better book about Haiti—a smarter, more thoughtful, tough-minded, romantic, plainspoken, intimate, well-reported book. Amy Wilentz has paid exceptionally close attention to this dreamy, nightmarish place for a quarter century, and with Farewell, Fred Voodoo she turns all that careful watching and thinking into a riveting work of nonfiction literature.

Catalogue page Read more...