Girard runs from Columbus's landfall through the sugar colony, independence, the emperors and presidents of the nineteenth century, the American occupation, the Duvaliers and the Aristide years, closing on the earthquake of January 2010 and the relief effort that followed.

The thread through the narrative is deliberately unwelcome. Foreign imperialism, Girard maintains, is not the principal cause of Haitian poverty; bad government and racial antagonism inside the country are, and the habit of blaming outsiders corrodes both enterprise and reform, since nothing one does can matter if everything was decided elsewhere. The earthquake serves as his illustration: unenforced building standards multiplied the dead, and the political class responded by bickering over its own tenure.

He is no gentler about Washington. Two occupations and decades of aid have failed, and the flow of assistance has persuaded too many Haitians that recovery is somebody else's job.