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RedditDubois's books appear at a quite different moment from James's classic. Whereas The Black Jacobins heralded the dawn of anticolonialism, Dubois's studies appear at a time when the false romance and real misery of empire are being rediscovered in Baghdad and, once again, in Port-au-Prince. In Iraq the Anglo-American coalition unleashed further havoc by dismantling the Iraqi Army. In Haiti the occupying forces of the Organization of American States are contending with the legacy of a previous US occupation, nearly a decade ago, that restored Aristide without an army, and on condition that he impose an austerity package. At the time of an earlier US occupation a Haitian critic noted the failure to let the country's people learn their own lessons, quoting the local saying: Tambour prêté pas fait bon danse ("The borrowed drum doesn't make a good dance").
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Speak Again, Memory
Greg Grandin: Readers of Fidel Castro's My Life will find explanations of the Cuban Revolution, but no apologies for its suppression of dissent.
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The Creep of Things
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow: Two new anthologies explore the virtues and occasional shortcomings of Bill McKibben's quest for environmental salvation.
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Hello Cruel World
John Palattella: The narrative journalism of David Samuels finds conversation, color and conflict in the vortex of American life.
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The American Way of Spying
Spencer Ackerman: The history of American intelligence-gathering is rife with incompetence, dysfunction and contempt toward legislative oversight.
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The Last Angry Man
Jeff Kisseloff: Eliot Asinof, blacklisted author of Eight Men Out, created a lifetime of work celebrating rebels and victims of injustice.
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The Novelist and the Murderers
Nathaniel Popper: Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder sparks calls for accountability in Central America's "kingdom of impunity."
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City of Fear
Jon Wiener: A new book explores the historical ties between African-American and Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles.
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For a Social Bailout
Robin Blackburn: Let's reinvent progressive economic policy, starting with our own sovereign wealth fund to deal with urgent social needs.
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Perishable Goods
Robin Blackburn: A new biography of economist Joseph Schumpeter explores his insights into the emerging world of globalized capitalism.
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The New World Order
Robin Blackburn: Two new books examine the diverse and ambitious alliances that led to the end of slavery in America.
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The True Story of Equiano
Robin Blackburn: Vincent Carretta's Equiano, the African is the complex narrative of a Carolina slave who bought his freedom, married an English woman and published a memoir on his life as a seafarer and gentleman.
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Of Human Bondage
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You Had to Be There
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The Bourgeois Revolutionary
Dubois suggests that the soul of Haiti is found in a religious ceremony, not in a declaration of independence, a Constitution or a Panthéon. The spirit of the revolution lives on in the people but not yet--despite the efforts of such reformist leaders as Anténor Firmin, Jean Price-Mars or Aristide--in the formal trappings of the state. Though Haiti is dirt poor, its people are not defined by employment and consumption. In Haiti the legacy of the descendants of slaves and rebels comprises echoes of both a precapitalist past and of a mighty refusal of the first global experiment in labor-intensive outsourcing. Those who have seen Jonathan Demme's tremendous movie The Agronomist, will know that Haiti still produces men and women of extraordinary courage, tenacity and spirit, true heirs of those who established the first American state to end slavery.
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