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Considered the best book ever written about Haiti, now updated with a New Introduction, “After the Earthquake,” features first hand-reporting from Haiti weeks after the 2010 earthquake. Through a series of personal journeys, each interwoven with scenes from Haiti’s extraordinary past, Amy Wilentz brings to life this turbulent and fascinating country. Opening with her arrival just days before the fall of Haiti’s President-for-Life, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Wilentz captures a country electric with the expectation of change: markets that bustle by day explode with gunfire at night; outlaws control country roads; farmers struggle to survive in a barren land; and belief in voodoo and the spirits of the ancestors remains as strong as ever. The Rainy Season demystifies Haiti—a country and a people in cruel and capricious times. From the rebel priest Father Aristide and the street boys under his protection to the military strongmen who pass through the revolving door of power into the gleaming white presidential palace—and the buzzing international press corps members who jet in for a coup and leave the minute it’s over—Wilentz’s Haiti haunts the imagination.
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The French invaded Algeria in 1830, and found a landscape rich in Roman remains, which they proceeded to re-use to support the constructions such as fortresses, barracks and hospitals needed to fight the natives (who continued to object to their presence), and to house the various colonisation projects with which they intended to solidify their hold on the country, and to make it both modern and profitable. Arabs and Berbers had occasionally made use of the ruins, but it was still a Roman and Early Christian landscape when the French arrived. In the space of two generations, this was destroyed, just as were many ancient remains in France, in part because “real” architecture was Greek, not Roman.
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.
"From 1830, the Roman ruins of North Africa intrigued invading French military officers and became key to the colonial narrative justifying French settlement of North Africa"--
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