A reference volume for English-speaking readers approaching Haiti, built to be consulted rather than read through. Entries are deliberately brief: enough to make sense of a name or term met elsewhere, with a bibliography and bibliographical essay at the back for anyone who wants to pursue it.

Coverage reaches from geography and population to political and governmental history, and on to culture and social welfare. Perusse describes a country whose survival under punishing conditions he finds remarkable, and a culture mixing African and French elements through speech, worship, custom and art, supplying colour and invention in the middle of poverty.

The editorial choices are stated plainly. Because the audience is anglophone, the English headword normally leads, with the French, Spanish or Creole term cross-referenced to it; words that translate awkwardly, or that English has already absorbed, keep their original form, usually with the definite article dropped.