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Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010. Edited by Martin Munro. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84631-498-8. 200 pp. $25.00 paperback.
Haiti After the Earthquake, by Paul Farmer. New York: Public Affairs, 2011. ISBN 978-1-58648-973-1. 456 pp. $27.99 hardcover.
Disasters are irreducibly social events. Earthquakes, floods, and other natural hazards happen all over the world, but the damage is always greatest in those places, and among those people, left vulnerable by political, economic, and social exclusion. The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 caused one of the worst disasters in modern history. The loss of life was staggering and the destruction of houses, hospitals, schools, and government buildings left a gapping hole in the country's already weak infrastructure. The earthquake - initially referred to as "the thing" (bagay la) - has forever changed Haiti, and rebuilding the country will be one of the most logistically complex tasks that the international community and the national government have ever attempted. A deeper understanding of the earthquake itself can help shine a light on the underlying contradictions that made it such a catastrophic event. It is, however, exceedingly difficult to document catastrophe. Disasters often cause trauma, and one of the hallmarks of traumatic events is the difficulty we have in speaking and writing about them. Two new books about the earthquake provide an initial step forward in representing "the thing."
The first is Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, a collection of 24 essays edited and introduced by Martin Munro. Part of the royalties of the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund, an organization that helps Haitian artists sell their work around the world. Haiti Rising is a wide-ranging book comprised of four substantive sections. The first section, "Survivor Testimonies," offers first-hand accounts of the January 12 earthquake and its immediate aftermath. The nine essays in this section, written by Haitian, American, and French scholars and artists, document the shocking details of a broken city during the first hours, days, and weeks after the quake. The second section, "Politics, Culture, and Society," is comprised of short analytic pieces that focus on how the earthquake and the international response to it might impact...