Reviews for A day for the hunter, a day for the prey

The average rating for A day for the hunter, a day for the prey based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-20 00:00:00 Ali Ibrahim Feels like a balanced account of Haitian music and its relationship to national politics in the mid to late 20th century. Making a qualified statement here because this is the only book I've ever come across in English with the weight of research (journalistic or academic) behind it to deal with this subject, so I don't know what I'm missing. Also, I'm not Haitian, and this book successfully convinced me that being Haitian ain't something you can fake. Book has useful chronology of music from Haiti's first American occupation in the 1910s to the reinstatement of Jean-Betrand Aristide in 1994. Book is also good at summing up the highly stratified socio-economic culture that has dominated the oldest Caribbean Republic from jump; does so in order to show music and society in conflict: We get to see the good guys win when Aristide -- championing the values and idioms of the music-hungry, proverb-rich Haitian underclass -- uses music to defeat the obstructive and oppressive candidates representing the bourgeois and upper classes. Book was well-timed, written as it was in 1995 so that it pre-dates Aristide's 1996 electoral defeat, his re-election in 2001 and the 2004 coup that removed him from office. It also seems to catch Haitian popular music at its rootsiest and most consciously African, which is useful if you're making the argument (as author is) that pop music is an effective political tool available to the roots-based, largely Afro-Hatitan underclass. Lightning squarely stoppered in the bottle, the book dates best for what it leaves out. Author is laudably wary of what he calls "culture brokers" who deal in romance and exoticism, so book is not riddled with Voudou fetishism or zombies that walk the night. When author discusses Voudou (as he must, it being the key to many of his subjects' intensely metaphorical lyrics) he is informative and even-handed and book, in general, is most valuable for being even-handed and informative. Book is ought to show you Haiti, not a nation of dudes with voodoo dolls. Haiti's culture is so complex and its reputation so sensational that parsing the truth from the myth must to take the focus of a brain surgeon, but author operates with confidence.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-04 00:00:00 Francis Hawcp A short, but intellectually conservative essay from a former president that demonstrates, rather tragically, how anti-intellectual conservatives have become in an effort to achieve and sustain power rather than stand on principles of an honest merit. Herbert Hoover rightly falls into a category of “worst” presidents (1928-1932) because he failed to see a way out of a collapsing depression and Americans needed swift action to restore the balance. Enter the great FDR. Nevertheless, Hoover remains the last philosophically and intellectually conservative president to hold the White House. And this little book is a brilliantly written definition for the title it holds, that individuals are the root of American greatness, rather than governments and institutions. Conservatives of late have lost the moral high ground to carry the kind of honest argument a man like Hoover made in the 1920s. He ended with a foretelling of conservative devolution... “We can not afford to rest at ease in the comfortable assumption that right ideas always prevail by some virtue of their own. In the long run they do. But there can be and there have been periods of centuries when the world slumped back into darkness merely because great masses of men became impregnated with wrong ideas.”