How’s that for a compelling headline? I went back and forth over putting this book here in the blog, as so much in it is extremely unpleasant, depressing, and . . . maddening. The subtitle also seems to imply that Christian missions are going to be a main target of its criticism, but that isn’t the case. Secular NGO’s come in for much of the blame heaped upon attempts to help Haiti. (An “NGO” is a “non-governmental organization,” a term of astonishing flexibility and scope.)The book opens with a gruesome scene: five Haitian peasant men are murdered by a mob because they are supposedly communists. In reality the men, and hundreds more like them, are actually members of a charitable cooperative advocating land reform. The violence drives out their organization and others like it, but soon new projects come back. Schwartz comes to Haiti also and stays for a decade, doing research for his doctorate and then working for various relief organizations himself. You’d think that his tenure there must have been post-earthquake, but no. The book ends well before then, around 2005.