The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

This book is much more than the biography of General Alex Dumas (today best known as the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, among many other novels). It provides a lot of context for General Dumas's life and times--including the French colony of St. Domingue, the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. The book makes two arguments: that General Alex Dumas achieved remarkable success, especially given the prejudices and hardships he had to overcome--and so should be more widely remembered; and that Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, based several of his literary works, including The Count of Monte Cristo, on his father's life. I found both claims well substantiated in the biography. I enjoyed the tone, which not only detailed the general's life and helped readers with the history surrounding that time and place, but also gave a personal account of researching the biography and teasing out the relevant details (including an incident of sanctioned safe breaking!). The narrator of the audiobook had a clear and enjoyable voice. All in all, a great book to listen to.

Toussaint Louveture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution by Matthew Clavin

This book provides a hemispheric perspective on the US Civil War by showing how Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were part of the dialogue and the public consciousness in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Although these figures are shadowy to most American citizens now, Clavin shows how both abolitionists and staunch supporters of slavery invoked and manipulated the memory of the general and the revolution in order to win public support for their positions. This book was very persuasive.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois

This book covers Haitian history after the Haitian Revolution. It shows how after the Revolution, the people in power sought to recreate certain types of colonial structures (mainly separating those with wealth and power from those without it). I found the book vastly informative, but also quite entertaining. It offered a mixture of information and covered both the leaders and the ordinary people of Haiti. Well worth the read, especially since the subject is so important to US history but also so neglected in the US.

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois

This book recounts the complex history of the Haitian Revolution in a readable and clear way. It gives a reasonable amount of background and does a good job tying the events in Haiti to the larger events that helped cause and provoke the Haitian Revolution (such as the political climate of France). The book insists on the importance of the Haitian Revolution beyond Haiti to world affairs and to questions of human rights. It tries to move beyond an account of just the leading generals and politicians to include a wide range of people, and it uses documentary and primary evidence where it exists. Overall this book is a great introduction to the complicated topic of the Haitian Revolution.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

This book is interested in the way we produce and understand history--a word that ambiguously stands both for what happened and how we talk about it. Trouillot contends that while history is not just constructed, it is also more complicated than a set of facts that can be revealed. He uses three case studies (the execution of Sans Souci, the disappearance of the Haitian Revolution in the historical record, and Columbus's voyage to the Americas) to make his points. His history is both interesting and provocative, and his larger argument is very compelling. Altogether his book is a very worthwhile read.

Haiti, Hegel, and Universal History by Susan Buck-Morss

This book contends that Hegel's ideas about the relationship between masters and slaves is not rooted in ancient philosophy, but in his own observations of the unfolding Haitian Revolution. Buck-Morss is interested in the connections between freemasonry and the Haitian Revolution as well. I found her arguments fairly convincing, especially in lining up Hegel's reading and newspaper coverage of the Haitian Revolution.

Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown

This book recreates the complicated story of Arthur Mervyn, a young man from the country who comes to Philadelphia and immediately finds himself embroiled in its corruption--first commercial and then physical. I am particularly interested in the ways that Haiti simmers below the surface of this novel. While the plot is hard to follow at first, by untwisting it the reader discovers the full extent to which the slave trade supports enterprise in early America.

The Black Vampyre by Uriah Derick D'Arcy

This book, which is perhaps more accurately described as a pamphlet, continues to amaze me. It's formally a mess: there's a short story (hard to call it a novel, when it clocks in at less than 50 small pages), and a long poem about vampirism. While the story starts as your typical horror story, it quickly becomes a critique of a wide variety of things, including but not limited to capitalism, plagiarism, and slavery.

The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

This monograph gives a fairly thorough history of the Haitian Revolution. While James contends that you can't understand the Haitian Revolution except in the context of the French Revolution, and historical circumstances more generally, I think James does a good job of avoiding the trap of merely reproducing metropolitan/colonial relationships. According to James, Toussaint L'Ouverture is the driving force behind the Revolution, so the book's a tad Toussaint heavy. Still, this book strikes me as an excellent overview of the Haitian Revolution and a good perspective from which to start thinking about that historical moment.

Island Beneath the Sea by Isabelle Allende

I enjoyed this book, set on Haiti and in New Orleans. The book tells the story of Zarité, an enslaved woman, who eventually persuades her master to free her after she saves his and his son's lives during the Haitian Revolution. In parts, it seems really engaged with its history (in a thematic way), whereas sometimes, I felt like the rich historical background was just so much window-dressing. I think in the long run, it's the former that prevails. I'd be very interested to read the book in Spanish, particularly because its settings are mostly Francophone.

Bug-Jargal by Victor Hugo

In this book Hugo has fictionalized the Haitian Revolution. He uses a frame story set during the Reign of Terror to tell a story about a young French officer, his fiancée, his loyal friend and subordinate, and Pierrot, a revolutionary who is also in love with the officer's fiancée. I was particularly interested in this story for all the masking that went on (Pierrot/Bug-Jargal, Habibrah, the dwarf's divided loyalties, the doubling of Bug-Jargal and D'Auverney). The story ends up being strongly anti-revolutionary and also strongly opposed to cultural mixing (in fact, D'Auverney's fiancée, Marie, is also his first cousin). The story is at times quite sentimental. I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

Seized: A Sea Captain's Adventures Battling Scoundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World's Most Troubled Waters by Max Hardberger

I received this book via Sneak Peek, a branch of Barnes and Noble's First Look program. I have put the rest of my review behind a cut as we're still discussing the book on the Barnes and Noble boards.

The Black Vampyre: a Legend of St. Domingo by Uriah Derick D'Arcy

This short pamphlet contains the story of a vampire, imported to Haiti at some point in the far past (certainly before the Haitian revolution), who was killed immediately upon purchase by his master for being a weakling, but who refused to die. He turns the master's newborn son into a vampire and then the master dies two. Two husbands later, he marries the master's wife, and on their wedding night, introduces her son, whose skin and hair and nails she had buried years ago, and digs up and reanimates his former master and the two other husbands. After a battle, those husbands are dead again. There's a scene where the vampires and slaves gather, but turn against each other, and by the end the master and his wife both take a potion which renders them human again--although the master hasn't aged the sixteen intervening years, much to his wife's delight, and her first child after the incident is the son of the vampire. If it's not clear from my description, the story is somewhat of a ridiculous romp. After this tale, D'Arcy makes a point of commenting that vampirism isn't just sucking blood, but happens when people steal labor of others (a Marxist point). Then there's a long poem at the very end. Very intriguing. I wish it were more widely available.

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere by Anna Brickhouse

In this book, Anna Brickhouse re-reads 19th-century American literature as being in significant dialogue with the rest of the hemisphere, even as politically, the US remains in a disengaged and antagonistic stance towards its neighbors. Brickhouse does an excellent job recuperating several texts and authors (including an American poet), and makes some intelligent guesses at identifying an anonymous author. I appreciated both the book's scope and its methodology. I was particularly intrigued by the chapter that sets The Last of the Mohicans against the anonymous Jicoténcal, and I am impressed by her incorporation of French and Spanish sources.

Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier

I enjoyed this novel of the Haitian Revolution and its immediate aftermath. I found the repetition of slavery, despite changing circumstances both telling and moving. I was also intrigued by Henri-Christophe's insistent copying of European and especially French conventions. I think the use of magical realism and voodoo was particularly effective.

The Secret History or the Horrors of St. Domingo by Leonora Sansay

This semi-autobiographical novel is framed as a collection of letters from the sister of a wife of a French planter to Aaron Burr when she, her sister, and the husband return to reclaim his plantation during the 1803 interlude in the Haitian Revolution. The status of language (which are being learned and spoken) is vexed, as is the domestic position of the narrator and the sister, who feels she has been mis-matched in marriage. I found the editorial arrangement of the letters (which, for one thing, obviously omits Burr's reactions) troubling.