The Rainy Season: Haiti — Then and Now
A classic reissued, with a stirring post-earthquake introduction by the author. In retrospect, this masterly work on Haiti and the underpinnings of its ongoing crisis offers brilliant insights into the Aristide phenomenon, the democratic game of the late 1900s and early 2000s, and the aid/development conundrum. With memorable portraits of the Tontons Macoute, the mainstream media that covers Haiti, the expat class, US development officials, a number of Haitian politicians, and Aristide himself, as well as everyday Haitians: grassroots leaders, street boys, villagers, market women, shantytown dwellers.
Haiti: Tragedy and Hope
This illuminating book gathers together the best of TIME's photos from the days after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, alongside essays by TIME writers and others. Wilentz's essay for the book, “In the Land of Memory,” accompanied by evocative black-and-white photographs from Haiti's tumultuous past, offers an explanation to the often posed but rarely answered question: Why is Haiti the way it is? It also provides a tragic but forward-looking examination of the impact of the earthquake on the country, and its traumatic implications for the people of Haiti.
“Even what is lost is not entirely lost. You lose the palace, but not the memory of the palace; you lose the child, the mother, the grandparents, the husband, but not the memory of those people. Over time, memories come to replace the people and places, inadequately, but nonetheless. Parents pass down the memory to children, or aunts to nephews, or friends to friends' children, and on through generations. Books guard and concentrate those memories, and art does, too, and photographs, scattered throughout the world. In Managua, another city that suffered a terrible earthquake, people still give memory directions: take me past the square where the old oak tree used to be, then go left at the corner where that church was. Reality is fleeting and what seems substantial is not really so. We know this in some way every day as we walk around doing laundry and driving to work and picking up kids. We know that life is precious and every moment valuable. But nothing can ever bring this understanding of life's ephemeral quality home so quickly, so solidly, and so absolutely as this utter destruction, wrought in less than a minute's time.”
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier
Through a series of personal journeys, each interwoven with scenes from Haiti's extraordinary past, Amy Wilentz, a brilliant young writer/reporter, 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 strugle 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.
Reviews
An enterprising attempt to describe a complex country, "The Rainy Season" is also a remarkable account of a journalist's transformation by her subject. Ms. Wilentz starts out as a somewhat naive reporter disembarking in a country undergoing seemingly epochal change: the toppling of the Duvalier dynasty. Armed with insatiable curiosity and considerable pluck, she proceeds to strip away the thick veil of overwrought exoticism that has long shrouded Haiti, recounting stories, based on her personal experiences, that leave the reader feeling like a privileged witness or traveler.
Filled with colorful vignettes on many subjects - the palpable sensation of unpredictability and terror in the streets of Port-au-Prince, where law is relegated to books and soldiers and freelance goons openly display their fondness for guns and their disregard for life; the beauty (when uncorrupted) of the much-maligned popular religion, voodoo; the strength and wisdom of simple peasants - the book offers a rich portrait of a country in fitful transition.
- The New York Times Book Review
"The Rainy Season is the kind of world-class reportage that deserves honor as history's first draft."
- Time
I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
From one of our most asture contemporary writers, Amy Wilentz, comes an irreverent, inventive portrait of the state of California and its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The prizewinning author, a lifelong easterner and an outsider in the West, takes the reader on a picaresque journey from exclusive Hollywood soirees to a fantasy city in the Mojave desert, from the La Brea Tar Pits to celebrity-besotted Sacramento, from the tents of Skid Row to surf-drunk Malibu, from a snowbird retreat near Mexico to the hippie preserve of tide-beaten Big Sur, along the way offering up sharp observations on politics, fund-raising, the water supply, the Beach Boys, earthquake preparedness, home economics, catastrophism, movie-star politicians, political movie stars, Charlie Manson, and location scouts who want to rent your house in order to make television commercials for bathroom wall cleansers or Swedish banks.
Wilentz moved to Los Angeles from a Manhattan wounded by September 11, only to discover a paradise marred by fire, flood, and mudslides. In what seemed like a joke to her, a Democratic governor nicknamed Gumby was about to be ousted by an Austrian muscleman in a bizarre election promoted by a millionaire whose business was car alarms. Intrigued, she set out to find the essence of the quirky, trailblazing state. During her travlels, she spots celebrities but can't quite place them, drops in on famous salons with habitués like Warren Beatty and Ariana Huffington, and visits the neglected office of one very special 9,000-year-old woman.
Plunging into the traffic of California, Wilentz noodles out meaning in some of the least likely of places; she sees the political in the personal and the personal in the political. By now an expert on tremors real and imagined, she offers readers on both coasts insights into where California stands today, and America as well.
Reviews
"This is the way to travel through California - as a passenger on Amy Wilentz's remarkable, funny, and vivid trip through the Land of Schwarzenegger. She has a sharp eye, a cool wit, a lyrical tone, a reporter's gumption, and a grasp of the place's strangeness and allure that makes the book entirely unforgettable."
- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief
"I love the way Amy Wilentz pokes here and pokes there and thinks about this and contemplates that, and pretty soon you are seeing California as you have never seen it before. This is a compellingly readable book, and I want another installment!"
- Jane Smiley, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
"As Amy Wilentz documents in this delightful romp of a memoir, it takes true grit - and a capacity for improvisation - to leave the certainties of the East behind and start life all over again on the coast of dreams."
- Kevin Starr, author of Inventing the Dream and Coast of Dreams
Read full-length reviews from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.
Martyrs' Crossing
Martyrs' Crossing tells a stunning story of love, fear, divided loyalties, ruined friendships, and personal sacrifice — against a backdrop of raging war in the Holy Land.
One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him.
He is drawn to Marina, the boy's American-born mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as "her soldier." In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes.
Marina's father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandson's story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship.
Caught in history's terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces.
Martyrs' Crossing is a poignant story of the ambiguities of war — of inarticulate longing and broken vows — set in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank.
Reviews
"Sophisticated and suspenseful...tautly written...Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction."
- The New York Times Book Review
"At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East....[Wilentz's] prose tugs at the reader....The characters are magnetic....[This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution."
- Entertainment Weekly
"So precise, so startling, so unforgettable....These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live."
- Los Angeles Times
"Magnificent...Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorker's highest ambitions: crystilline, pure, faultlessly communicative....Like the best documentaries, Martyrs' Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world."
- Chicago Tribune
"A brilliantly researched meditation on the crisis in the Middle East...Martyrs' Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters - and yet it remains a lean thriller."
- The New York Observer
"[An] affecting first novel...Wilentz has accomplished nearly the impossible....She has captured the corrosive moral shortcomings of Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the near helplessness of the people pulled into their wake - yet she renders virtually all of them with a deeply knowing sympathy."
- The Baltimore Sun
"With intensity and skill, Amy Wilentz manages to show us the internal life of characters who are usually seen as journalistic subjects, those struggling in the complex and highly charged world of the Palestinians and Israelis. A deeply personal and tragic incident is at the center of this novel. The backdrop is one of political and social conflict, but the subject turns out to be the wider one of being human - of the difficulty of enduring loss and of trying to live by one's beliefs when all the world seems to be against you."
- Susan Minot, author of Lust & Other Stories