Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
A Long Way from Poland
By Selden Rodman
Poland's Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802–1803 Press
by Jan Pachonski, by Reuel K. Wilson
East European Monographs (Boulder), distributed by Columbia University, 378 pp., $35.00
I have just returned from a brief visit to Haiti, under commission to write a second report on the revolution of February 7, 1986, that overthrew the thirty-year Duvalier dictatorship. And so my first reaction (on sight) to a book about the Polish component of the Napoleonic invasion of Haiti in 1802 was that it must be academic and irrelevant. After all, our interest in the Western Hemisphere's most underdeveloped nation had to be primarily that Haiti was free at last and apparently headed for at least some degree of political democracy; and secondly that Haiti's world-renowned arts were still flourishing.
Review, 2796 words
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