Books in 2023: A Personal Selection

Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, painted by English portraitist Richard Evans, 1816.

Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer

A great contribution to Haitian studies by the British author Paul Clammer, this book vividly brings to life the dramatic era of the complex and mercurial independence leader who would go on to become Haiti’s only king.

Port-au-Prince au cours des ans: Tome II 1804-1915 by Georges Corvington

Two volumes originally published by Haiti’s Éditions Henri Deschamps collected in this 2007 single volume by Montréal’s Éditions du Centre International de Documentation et d'Information Haitienne (CIDIHCA), this sweeping history of Haiti’s capital by the Haitian historian Georges Corvington is a must for any scholar of the country.

Prospero's Cell by Lawrence Durrell

An impressionistic and disparate memoir of the Ionian island of Corfu by the British author who lived there from 1935 to 1940, though this book has some moments of very nice prose, I still found it a little unfocused and a bit too in love with his own voice to be truly captivating. In terms of evoking Greece in all its glory and mystery, I found Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi a much more compelling read.

The Portable Gerbasi: Selected Early and Late Poems by Vicente Gerbasi 

This collection of poems which bookend the career of the Venezuelan writer and diplomat Vicente Gerbasi are masterfully translated by Guillermo Parra and vibrate with the life and colour of that South American nation, which hard times and bad government may have dimmed in recent years but never fully extinguished.

The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning by Roy Hattersley

This is a very engaging biography by a British politician and journalist focusing on the long an dramatic life of the severe and highly idiosyncratic founder of Methodism and gives the reader a good flavour for the religious and political battles being fought in 18th century England.

A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

Published in 1968, this novel recounts the story of a young working-class boy named  Billy Casper from a mining area in Northern England who finds and gradually trains a kestrel (a falcon-like bird), which provides a respite from his life with a rather nasty brother and mother (his father is absent) and sadistic schoolmates and teachers. The long passages focusing on sport kind of lost me, but nevertheless it’s a book that gives the reader a feeling for the loneliness and struggles that can accompany youth as well as the moments of joy and transcendence. 

For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria by Cheryl Johnson-Odim

This books tells the extraordinary life story of the Nigerian political activist, educator and feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The mother of musician Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, Ransome-Kuti had an accomplished and impressive life in her own right. Born in Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun State in southwestern Nigeria to an aristocratic family, she gained the nickname the “Lioness of Lisabi” for her leadership of the Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU). As well as telling the story of a patriot and committed internationalist, the book is also a fascinating survey of the politics, society, hierarchy, and customs of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria.

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948 by Zachary Lockman

A fascinating and valuable look into the tensions and contradictions between the desire of early left-wing Zionists to build the Jewish state of Israel while at the same time maintaining some kind of fidelity to their ideals of an empowered and motivated working-class across national borders, this book delves deeply into complex motivations and political-religious dynamics better than mere slogans ever could.

Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli

The first in a trilogy of crime novels featuring Inspector De Luca, this book takes place as Italy’s fascist Repubblica di Salò sputters to its collapse and is as interesting for its depiction of a compromised and often depraved society as it is for the murder mystery at its heart.

El Desterrado de París: Biografía del Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827-1898) by Félix Ojeda Reyes

This is an impressive work of scholarship by the Puerto Rican historian Félix Ojeda Reyes examining the life of Ramón Emeterio Betances, physician, diplomat, intellectual and perhaps Puerto Rico’s most lucid and forward-looking patriot.

Collected Poems 1950-1993 by Vernon Scannell 

The life’s work of a British poet whose ruling passions were the somewhat unlikely combination of literature and boxing, this is a lovely volume that continues the wonderful poem “Autumn,” which evokes a kind of London that will somehow always be with us.

Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics by Anita M. Waters 

A very interesting book that delves into the complexities of Jamaica’s political battles between 1967 and 1983, this sociological work examines how the Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party sought to come to terms with and at times co-opt the culture signifiers of Jamaica’s homegrown religion and rebel music.

Michael Deibert speaking about Haiti on The World

I spoke with Marco Werman at The World about the shifting dynamics among the illegal armed groups in and around Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and what this means for the country as a whole. Please listen to the segment here.

2022: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

Though much of my year was wrapped up in working on my new book, I did publish a few articles that I thought were worthwhile during the last 12 months. 

My Articles

In Latin America, Backers of Leftist Dictatorships Look the Other Way for Newlines Magazine (12 January 2022)

Restoring Glory to a Baltimore Neighborhood for Newlines Magazine (29 March 2022)

Freedom Soup and the Liberation of Haiti for Newlines Magazine (31 May 2022)

Haiti Is At War for Ozy (14 August 2022)

Interviews 

Former Haitian PM sanctioned by Canada denies wrongdoing in The Globe and Mail (30 November 2022)

What is causing the energy crisis in Puerto Rico? on TRT (27 September 2022)

Michael Deibert Speaking on the Anniversary of Assassination of Haiti's Jovenel Moïse on Al Jazeera (7 July 2022)

In 2023, it will be a new year and a new book, this one examining the tenure of the great U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass as U.S. ambassador to Haiti and the tangled regional politics of the Caribbean in the late 19th century.

May the year 2023 leave you all feeling loved and appreciated. As the sun sets on 2022, I think the words of Pablo Neruda are apt for this moment.

Y una a una las noches 

entre nuestras ciudades separadas 

se agregan a la noche que nos une  

(And one by one the nights 

between our separated cities 

are joined to the night that unites us)

Con mucho amor.

xo

MD

Books in 2022: A Personal Selection

 

Henry Miller on the Greek island of Hydra, 1939.

Athens In Poems: An Imaginative Map of the City

An absolutely gorgeous selection of poetry celebrating the Greek capital given to me by the manager of a cooperative bookstore in the neighborhood of Exarcheia when I was there this past autumn.

Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel

A picture of a vanished place and people, these stories by the great Ukrainian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (who later was arrested and executed by the security services of Joseph Stalin), this interlocked collection focuses on the world of a crime boss in Odessa called Benya Krik, known as the King, and the human

fauna the move within it in 1920s Odessa.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett 

Gripping, taut and often bleak stories about mostly young people in contemporary Ireland. 

The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout

A searing dystopian vision by an eminent Algerian writer who was slain by Islamist radicals in that country in 1993, this novel (originally written and published in French as Le Dernier Été de la raison) depicts a nation overtaken by intolerant religious fanatics. A beautifully written, poignant and prescient book, the author can write lines about how "Today, everything was heralding fall, with its tender light, benevolent even in its sadness" even as he depicts a place descended into madness. 

Insurgent Cuba Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 by Ada Ferrer

An enlightening book look at the complex racial dynamics of Cuba's long struggle to free itself from Spanish rule.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

A mob story depicting the underworld of then-contemporaneous early 1970s Boston, this book crackles with good and often profane dialogue as the plot heads to its inevitable dénouement.

Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

A book that gets to the heart of the extreme political commitment that informed Milton's life and work and chronicles in detail a life of dizzying triumphs and bitter disappointments that gave the world some of its greatest poetry.

Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia Book by Mervyn Meggitt

A story of the Walbiri people scattered through Australia's Northern Territory by the anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, I found this book very interesting in its depiction of a people and culture very foreign to many readers yet still informed by great complexity and a deep bond with the land where they live.

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

A book chronicling the American author Henry Miller’s travels through Greece as World War II and his own unwanted return to the United States loomed, this is a beautiful tribute to the country, its culture and its history, as Miller finds himself inspired and rhapsodizing about a new locale in way he hadn't since his early days in Paris a decade earlier. There is a poignancy to the loveliness of his descrpuitons made more so by both the impending conflict and his realization that, at nearly 50, he himself was steadily getting older:

There was the air outside and the sky full of stars. I had promised myself on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It was my first real vacation in 20 years and I was ready for it. Everything seemed right to me. There was no time anymore, just me drifting along and a slow boat ready to meet all commerce and take whatever it came along. Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light. I couldn’t ask for more, nor did I want anything more. I had everything a man could desire, and I knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I felt the war coming - it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings. 

In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers by William Palmer

An unsentimental look at the often destructive role that alcohol played in the lives of 11 authors, including  John Cheever, Malcolm Lowry, Flann O’Brien and Jean Rhys, Flann O’Brien, this book makes one all the more appreciative of the brilliance the writers that it covers produced considering the ferocious demons many of them were battling.

The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks  

A first-person account of the life of a working shepherd in Cumbia in the north of England, this book may be a little too in love with its subject (the folks up north are inevitably wily, hard-working and resourceful, everyone not from that circle rather less so), but it still manages to paint an evocative picture of a alternately harsh and abundant landscape and the people who work it and cater to their animals who live there.

Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone

A magnificent anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist work set in Benito Mussolini's Italy (where the author was in exile from), the novel introduces us to the memorable revolutionary character of Pietro Spina, whose own ethos can be summed up by his declaration:

One can be free even under a dictatorship on one simple condition, that is, if one struggles against it. A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man. A man who struggles for what he believes to be right as a free man. You can live in the most democratic country in the world, and if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not a freeman, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that must be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, whatever share you can.

The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor

A finely-honed collection of short stories by a renowned Irish writer depicting people who, in a number of ways, are haunted by decisions they either took or didn't take and where those choices have led them in their lives.