Book reviews: non-fiction from M.J. Fievre, John Miller and B Smith
The horror of Haiti, a feud within the early Mormon church, and the coming Alzheimer’s crisis are this week’s picks
by M.J. Fievre
Beating Windward Press (e-book)
This is a tormented memoir of violence in the home and country of M.J. Fievre’s childhood. Hers is a story of a difficult relationship with her father, a Jekyll-and-Hyde character given to rages, when he would threaten to kill his family, and with Haiti at a time of political turbulence in the years after Baby Doc Duvalier’s removal. In 1991, when Fievre was 10, former Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, elected the previous year, was overthrown by the military. On the night of his exile, she writes, political prisoners were killed, “one bullet in each head”. There’s more death, and threat of such, as thugs, some former tontons macoutes (Duvalier’s personal police), menace families with machetes and guns. Fievre even keeps a list of random deaths in a Hello Kitty diary. Though brutal, these descriptions somehow pale in comparison to the episode in which Fievre, emboldened by a pocket knife, confronts her father, who, in his professional life, is a charming law teacher. She declares, “I hate you.” He replies, “You know where the guns are.” Stories, wonderfully paced, fill this book. They will give you the shivers.
by John Miller