The Big Truck That Went By

A new book about surviving the Haiti earthquake and what really happened after. 2015 PEN Literary Award Finalist. Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan and J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards.

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I’ve got a new website. Visit it at: 

jonathanmkatz.com

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The Dominican Time Bomb

The Dominican Republic hasn’t yet acted on its plans to expel hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent. But the worst may be yet to come.

There’s a bad scene in the Dominican Republic right now. And it could get worse. My latest in the New York Times Magazine.

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The King and Queen of Haiti

Sunday, January 30, 2011. Two hundred thousand people occupied Egypt’s Tahrir Square, defying a military curfew to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia’s authoritarian leader had just been overthrown, unleashing a wave of anti-government protests from Yemen to Syria to Morocco. South Sudan’s provisional president...

ICYMI: My piece last month on Hillary and Bill Clinton’s legacy in Haiti. 

Published in Politico Magazine, with photographer Allison Shelley, thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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Whatever is or isn’t underground, the view from the top of Morne Bossa was spectacular. Rising majestically in the center of the picture are peaks of the Bonnet a L’Eveque. And if you look closely at the lefthand side, you’ll see the Citadelle Laferriere, the imposing 10,000-square-meter, 130-foot-high fortress built by thousands of laborers, many of them forced into treacherous service under the Haitian King Henri Christophe between 1805 and 1820. Haiti had just won its independence in a war against the French, British, and Spanish, and Christophe ordered the fortress built to defend against an invasion he feared Napoleon might order at any time to reclaim the once-valuable colony. That invasion never came. Today the fortress is best known as a tourist site and symbol of Haitian and black power and pride. I don’t know what King Henri would think of the plans for the mine here, but if Morne Bossa gets blasted for an open-pit goldmine, it will ruin the view. 

Image and caption by Jonathan M. Katz.

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The sign says “blocks for sale.” People are using them to build new homes. It’s funny. Five years ago this wasn’t a neighborhood at all—it was an open desert. I remember coming out her a few months after the quake to visit the nearby Camp Corail, the first organized relocation camp for earthquake survivors, built by the UN and U.S. military to house people relocated from the Port-au-Prince tent camp overseen by Sean Penn. I discovered soon after that the plan, at least in the minds of some influential Haitians, had been to provide a labor force for garment factories that would be built out here. At the same time, then-President Preval began encouraging people to come squat on the land, keeping the factory project from moving forward. Today that boondoggle has become Canaan, which by some metrics is now one of Haiti’s largest cities, perched precariously on hillsides with homes built from the shabby cinderblock that crumbled in the quake. That people with almost nothing managed to build a new city on raw land is a triumph of resilience and ingenuity. The conditions under which it happened are a testament to the failure of Haiti’s postquake reconstruction

Image and caption by Jonathan M. Katz. 

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I’ve been covering the Chapel Hill shootings for the New York Times. Here’s my latest, from March 3, a deep dive into the victims’ last day and the apparent killer’s motives:

A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars. If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking.

(Photo: Travis Dove for the New York Times)

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The U.N. Caused Haiti's Cholera Epidemic. Now the Obama Administration Is Fighting the Victims.

ICYMI, here's my piece from last week on the Haiti cholera hearing in New York:

On Thursday, embattled victims finally got a day in court. What was most remarkable about the hearing in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan was not the lawyers’ arguments or Judge J. Paul Oetken’s pointed questions, but who was doing the arguing. The opposition to the thousands of Haitian cholera victims did not come from the U.N., which did not send a representative, but the United States government.

(via @tnr)

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Writings, lately

The American Media Is in Full Panic Mode Over Ebola — And It's Only Making Things Worse

Where the threats are abstract, we operate on one of two modes—apathy and panic. Both are destructive. (Mic)

  Jean-Claude Duvalier Is Dead, But He Will Haunt Haiti for Years to Come

Duvalier inherited a country and a dictatorship, and squandered them both. (The New Republic)

  UN official shows worrying signs of foot-in-mouth disease

The former chief of UN Haiti mission chief just granted a rare interview about the origins of the cholera epidemic in Haiti. Here’s a fact check of his most important statement. (Beacon Reader)

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AUDIO: Haiti's reconstruction failed. What's going to happen now?

From CBC Radio Sunday Edition: Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, discusses the aftermath of Haiti's earthquake and the country's future. (Aug. 31, 2014)

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C-SPAN Video: Longform Journalism in the Age of Twitter

In May, the five nominees for the 2014 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism participated in a panel discussion on the future of longform journalism at the New York Public Library.

The panelists were:

Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

Fred Kaplan, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

David Finkel, author of Thank You For Your Service

Sheri Fink, author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Dan Fagin, author of Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

and host James Hoge, former editor of Foreign Affairs

(click the title or the photo below to watch)

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Tavis Smiley interviews Jonathan M. Katz about Haiti's post-quake reconstruction, and a massive cholera epidemic caused by UN troops sent to help the ailing country. The only full-time U.S. correspondent in Haiti during the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, Katz broke the story that UN soldiers were likely responsible for the epidemic nine months later. His book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, recently won the Overseas Press Club of America award for the best nonfiction book of the year. Aired May 13, 2014, on PBS.

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NOW IN PAPERBACK

The Big Truck That Went By is now in paperback, on sale today toupatou (everywhere):

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Independents 

The new edition is updated throughout, with two special features not found in the hardcover edition:

A brand-new afterword about disaster and response since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

A discussion guide about the book's major themes and topics, designed for classrooms and book clubs.

As well as four pages of maps and eight pages of photos. (The Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and hardcover editions are all still available too at the links above. The audio edition, which includes the new afterword, is here.)

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And to launch the new edition, I'll be reading and singing copies tomorrow  at Miami's landmark Books & Books. Here's info and directions:

Launch party! Wednesday, April 2 Start time: 8 pm Books & Books 265 Aragon Ave Coral Gables, FL

Na we la!

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Why Cholera Persists In Haiti Despite An Abundance Of Aid

NPR's Linda Wertheimer interviewed me last week on Haiti's sanitation and the cholera crisis, following my recent piece at The New Yorker. You can listen at the link above.

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UN Cholera Envoy: '€˜It was never the intention ... to bring cholera in Haiti'€

Three years after scientists say United Nations soldiers brought a killer strain of cholera to the Western Hemisphere, I sat down with the UN'€™s new point man on the crisis.

In a surprisingly candid interview, he answered questions about legal battles, recalcitrant donors, and fighting an epidemic that has killed 9,000 people and counting.

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What do you think?

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Thrilled to announce that an audio version of The Big Truck That Went By is now on sale, read by the terrific Jonathan Davis.

Davis is one of Audible's featured narrators, with over a hundred credits including Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Brett Easton Ellis' Glamaora, and thirty Star Wars titles for Lucasfilm.

He does an incredible job, bringing a whole new feeling and interpretation to the work. Even if you read and enjoyed it in print, I highly recommend hearing his version as well. (There's a sample on the Amazon page too.)

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The Celebrity as Hero: When Sean Penn Fought a Phantom Epidemic

I adapted a piece from the book into a larger discussion of celebrity and power in humanitarian aid, posted at Gawker.

It's specifically about Sean Penn and a tragic, confusing incident in 2010, so much of the discussion has focused on him personally. But as I try to indicate in the piece, the subject is much bigger than any one guy. With the ever-deeper infusion of Hollywood into global politics (look up "Children, Invisible" for starters), it gets more relevant by the day. Have a look:

Halfway through the trailer for Ben Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the title daydreamer--stuck in the rat race with boring men in boring suits at Life magazine-- lifts his eyes from his desk toward a photograph on a bulletin board. Now here's the payoff, when staid reality breaks into excitement, and the nebbishy lead is drawn into the world of fantasy and adventure that Fox is betting will win our $12 and two hours come Christmas. It's a photo of Sean Penn.

(read the whole thing at Gawker)

Not a tent camp