The Serpent and the Rainbow
A Harvard scientist's astonishing journey into the secret societies of Haitian voodoo, zombis, and magic.
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What Hacker News says
- > could you point us to any history you've written in this style, as an example?
This misses the point: if you want to know why readers aren't connecting with written history or written anything for that matter, ask readers, not writers. Anyone can write something they want to write--that's not skilled, useful, or admirable. Writing something other people want to read is the difficult, useful skill. Writers like Walther are writing what they want to write and complaining that readers don't want to read it. It's like leading a horse to salt water and then complaining the horse won't drink.
> EDIT: for that matter, any history anyone has written in this style?
The Social History of the Machine Gun or The Serpent and the Rainbow (the book, not the movie).
> see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
Is your point here to argue that entertaining, accessible writing and accurate historical writing are mutually exclusive? Why would they be? Do you have any reason at all to believe this to be the case?
- The Year of Living Dangerously. The Serpent and the Rainbow.
- Haiti is a complex and contradiction-ridden place.
As the poorest nation, per capita, in western hemisphere, Haiti is often the "face of poverty", with photographs of its most unfortunates featured on fund-raising newsletters of every sort but with the failures of efforts at reform being featured on every debunking of
I have a personal friend, white, who served as something of a liaison, moving goods, between the random (white) Americans who showed up on Haiti after the earth quake and the people (black, Haitian) who needed assistance. She helped some substantial number of people but naturally only a drop in the bucket.
Haiti has a complex structure of repression which has held power for quite some time. The multitude of corrupt processes in the nation naturally don't help either. But as is visible, charities are remarkably unconcerned with these subtleties, being bureaucracies like all bureaucracies, they plow ahead with pouring X dollars into Y problem with consultations with Z experts.
Literally, you can find groups of people in America, Houston in particular, doing 100x as the Red Cross with considerably less - because they are people actually walking into the situation and trying to figure out what's needed.
Bureaucracy once has its strength relative to such efforts but this strength seems entirely lost now. I'd chalk it down to the general decay of this society.
What I know of Haiti comes from above, meeting just a few Haitians and the following texts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comedians_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpent_and_the_Rainbow_(b... http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=9966
- I wonder why NyQuil is outside of quotes. Did a professor of medicine really make such an unbelievable mistake?
Let us not forget that this class of drugs (which includes diphenhydramine (Benadryl), scopolamine, and datura is called "deliriant".
From Wikipedia: " The term was introduced by David F. Duncan and Robert S. Gold to distinguish these drugs from psychedelics and dissociatives, such as LSD and ketamine respectively, due to their primary effect of causing delirium, as opposed to the more lucid states produced by other hallucinogens (psychedelics and dissociatives)... The delirium produced is characterized by stupor, confusion, confabulation, and regression to "phantom" behaviors such as disrobing and plucking.[2] Other commonly reported behaviors include holding full conversations with imagined people, finishing a complex, multi-stage action (such as getting dressed) and then suddenly discovering one had not even begun yet, and being unable to recognize one's own reflection in a mirror."
This is the expected behavior for someone who consumes about 500-700mg of diphenhydramine at once (the dose suggested on the package is usually 50mg). Benadryl is probably the most powerful hallucinogen known; it distorts the senses far more than even some of the most notorious illegal drugs and the reasons for its continued over-the-counter legality might make for an interesting book. Obviously it has healthy uses, and many deliriants have long-established religious uses in North America. The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie are two books that explain how anticholinergic drugs are what create real-life zombies.
