Schuller's book comes out of an independent study of eight camps for people displaced by Haiti's earthquake, from which more than 150 interviews were gathered. Those interviewed ranged from earthquake survivors living in the camps to Haitian front-line staff and camp managers to foreign aid personnel.

What the account documents is a gap between the size of the response, running to billions of dollars, and what it produced on the ground. The relief effort did not merely fall short; it set off consequences no one intended, tearing at established social and cultural arrangements and driving violence upward, with women absorbing much of it.

Because the testimony comes from several positions inside the same operation at once, the same events can be viewed from the camps and from the agencies that were meant to be serving them.