“The Relief Disaster”

Reason reviews Jonathan M. Katz’s new book:

In The Big Truck That Went By, Katz presents an engaging first-person account of the quake and the first year of the international response that followed. He recounts living through the earthquake in the AP house, which served both as his residence and as an office for himself and his Haitian fixer/driver/translator, Evens Sanon. The first chapter takes readers through the chilling hours that followed the quake as Katz and Sanon rode around a devastated Port-au-Prince trying to apprehend the destruction and find a cell signal to file reports.

“For decades,” Katz writes, “researchers have told us that the link between cataclysm and social disintegration is a myth perpetuated by movies, fiction, and misguided journalism.” His experience after the quake rebuts such myths. While “the quake zone would be seen as a helpless zoo” to those overseas, Katz says that there “was no sign of violence….In the midst of near-total disaster, people were trying to go on.” All the people panicking, he writes, were outside the country.

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