"I just finished The Ghosts of Makara. I think it should be required reading in every history class in New Zealand. It is an interesting account of time past; it is remarkable that you remembers your childhood so clearly. I enjoyed your aside about "Treasonably my Haitian-born wife suggested years later that New Zealanders didn't know how to season lamb and used mint sauce to hide the strong taste!" The pages about "the sudden sense of cold realism, the realization that life was not a game" really hits one with their own memories. And your feeling about the Pamir, "The magic of this windjammer, sails billowing in the trade winds still evokes that thrill more than 50 years later." Beautiful writing.

This book is easy to read and full of color. I have been to Makara and this vivid description of the Makara of yesteryear reads like a movie. I enjoyed it and felt that as I read, I could taste the nostalgic loss of a reality that in some ways was a paradise and in others must have been hell. Although the story takes place in a far away land this could have been anywhere in the world. I recommend this very personal family account, as the story could easily be yours or mine.

Wow.... This books depicts a harsh reality.. it is amazingly real, and accurate. I was born in Haiti and I am a witness to this reality. If you want to know about Haiti, and US policy read it. I enjoyed it.

This book is unusual, because it touches on issues that are sometimes un sexy yet poigniant. It reveals a truth about a Dictatorship with accurate detail. It is written from the perspective of a journalist who covered the area for TIME Magazine years and who really got to understand and feel the situation and players but did not take sides. It is worth reading. It was very educational and helped me understand what is going on now in Central America.

This book is unusual, because it touches on issues that are sometimes un sexy yet poigniant. It reveals a truth about a Dictatorship with accurate detail. It is written from the perspective of a journalist who covered the area for TIME Magazine years and who really got to understand and feel the situation and players but did not take sides. It is worth reading. It was very educational and helped me understand what is going on now in Central America.

THis is a great read. Popular history. A great book about an extraordinary act of heroism in which a small band of men killed a brutal dictator.

As one of the previous reviewers describe, read Crassweller's book about Trujillo to really get a good picture of how awful this Dominican dictator was to his people. For those interested in the assasination of the dictator, Diederich's book describes in minute detail of how the murder took place. Crassweller's book leaves much of this out. Trujillo was as bad to his people as Saddam is to the Iraqi people.
One good point of this book is the reader's knowledge that Diederich was there at the time in the country. This is no author piecing something together from written sources, but a news correspondent covering the Dominican Republic during the time of the incident. The book was very readable.

As you'll know if you've been to Santo Domingo, Robert Crassweller's "Trujillo" has long been the best-known biography of the dead Dominican dictator, perhaps owing partly to its omnipresence in the island's hotel gift shops. But "Death of the Goat" by Bernard Diederich is in my opinion the best and most readable non-fiction work through which to explore Trujillo and his bloody regime.

"Death of the Goat" has as its focal point the assasination of Rafael Trujillo, that is, the end of a 30-year-long story: the preparations, the backgrounds of the assasins, the frantic attempts to hide once the deed was done. But while focusing on the deed Diederich does an outstanding job of explaining how things got to that point, and does so less with the formality of a historian than with the incisiveness of an investigative reporter. This book is especially valuable for the light it sheds on the six months after Trujillo's assasination. Far from bringing about an immediate collapse to the regime, the assasination ushered in a six-month reign of terror during which Trujillo's family, led by the bloodthirsty Ramfis, exacted horrifyingly gruesome revenge on anyone they believed to have been involved in the plot. The torture visited on men such as father and son Miguel Angel Báez and Miguel Angel Báez Diaz is painful to read about even today and definitely not for those with weak stomachs. The curtain did not really fall on the "Era of Trujillo" until his sons executed their last captives at Trujillo's hacienda in November 1961 and then fled the country with their father's body and a hefty chunk of their nation's wealth.

The insightful and shocking look Diederich provides at the period after the assasination is essential reading for anyone seeking knowledge of the modern Dominican Republic. Perhaps most unbelievable of all is the fact that Joaquín Balaguer, one of Trujillo's rubber-stamp "Presidentes", could through his silence collaborate with such atrocities and yet still be elected president time and time again, most recently in 1994. Also hard to comprehend is how one of Balaguer's political allies could be Donald Reid Cabral, whose brother Robert committed suicide after the plot rather than be taken alive by the remaining Trujilloites whom Balaguer was involved with. In Dominican politics, truth really IS stranger than fiction. Diederich shows us why.

This book is an excellent look back at Francois Duvalier, the quiet little "country doctor" from Haiti who by strange twists of fate became one of the most ruthless dictators in the history of the western hemisphere.

Papa Doc's origins are set against the wild backdrop of Haiti's revolving door governments, and her proximity to the Domincan Republic's bloodthirsty ruler, Rafael Trujillo.

The authors detail the political chess game Duvalier played with rulers like Batista and Castro in Cuba and Eisenhower and Johnson in the United States, playing cold war enemies against each other to secure his own power.

The book moves along quickly, if a bit matter-of-factly. Little analysis of personalities or motives is given, and the events in the book can pass by quickly and chaotically as the real life events in Haiti they chronicle. The prose is spare, but the insights the reader can infer are profound.

In short, anyone interested in the history of Papa Doc's rule in Haiti needs to read this book. It is out of print, but it is worth the search.

This book is a historical document. It is well written and easy to read. I couldn't put it down. It also prepared me for my trip to the island. I have had the pleasure and recommend two of his other books about Dictators: Trujillo; Death of the dictator. and Somosa: and the legacy of US involvement in Central America. A must read for all Political Science Majors or anybody who is interested in politics and dictators.

This is a very intense compilation of the facts, and circumstances of one unbelievably cruel dictatorship, and the conditions that helped perpetuate it. As a Dominican born after the Trujillo's Era, I'm very glad and thankful that someone (in this case Mr. Bernard Diederich) having been in such a prominent position (Reporter in the Caribbean during the Trujillo's regime), decided to put together all the information that he had access to. This book is an amazing source of information for those who wonder why such a cruel dictatorship lasted so long, and why so many atrocities went unpunished until after the death of the dictator.