Bellegarde-Smith approaches the January 2010 earthquake as one entry in a long series rather than an isolated catastrophe. Haiti sits on unstable ground and has absorbed shocks of both natural and human making since its colonial beginnings and through its life as a sovereign state.

The country, he notes, was already engaged in remaking itself politically, socially, and culturally in the years after the Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986, following three decades of family rule begun in 1957. The quake added physical reconstruction to that unfinished work, and prompts him to ask whether the endurance Haitians are so often praised for has a limit.

Writing from a Haitian vantage point, Bellegarde-Smith examines what followed the event Haitians named Goudougoudou, setting it beside the other trials that have tested the country across two centuries.