Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution - Hardcover

Mackinnon, J. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595581812 ISBN 13: 9781595581815

Publisher: The New Press, 2007

Synopsis

At nightfall on June 22, 1965, amid the turmoil of the Dominican revolution and U.S. military occupation, a soldier emerged from the outskirts of a small town to report that he had just shot and killed two policemen and an outspoken Catholic priest. It’s the opening scene in a mystery that, forty years later, compels writer J.B. MacKinnon—the priest’s nephew, born five years after the incident—to visit the island nation for himself. Beginning with scant official information, he embarks on a chilling investigation of what many believe was a carefully plotted assassination—and on a search for the uncle he never knew.

Winner of Canada’s highest award for literary nonfiction, Dead Man in Paradise takes MacKinnon to corners of the country far from the Caribbean paradise seen by millions of tourists; he meets with former revolutionaries and shadowy generals from the era of dictatorship, family members of the slain policemen, and struggling Dominicans for whom the dead priest is a martyr, perhaps even a saint. Along the way, he uncovers a story inseparable from the brutal history of the New World, from the fallout of American invasion, and from the pure longing for social justice that once touched a generation. Part memoir, part travelogue, part mystery thriller, Dead Man in Paradise is “a testament to the enduring virtues of literary journalism” (The Georgia Straight).

About this title

About the Author:

J.B. MacKinnon is an independent journalist whose feature reportage on issues ranging from African prisons to anarchism in America has won three National Magazine Awards. He is the co-author (with Alisa Smith) of Plenty and lives in Vancouver, Canada.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the Dominican Republic, in the summer of 1965, when a popular rebellion triggered civil war and intervention by American troops, the author's uncle Arthur, a Canadian priest, was killed along with two policemen under suspicious circumstances. In this engrossing investigation, journalist MacKinnon (coauthor of Plenty), winner of three National Magazine Awards, searches for the truth behind his uncle's death and the dark legacy of dictatorship and poverty that it symbolizes. The story is something of a picaresque through the modern Dominican Republic. The author encounters a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, tight-lipped generals brooding over past crimes, and a populace fearful of the police and of outsiders asking questions; as he wanders about looking for witnesses, he gets lost in a maze of rural hamlets that are all named Los Jobillos. The official line that Father Art was accidentally shot while speeding through a checkpoint becomes increasingly dubious, and other possibilities arise: that he was collateral damage in a fight over a woman or, more probably, assassinated for speaking out against repression and poverty. Through MacKinnon's novelistic treatment, this intriguing mystery unfolds into a haunting portrait of a rich land marked by grotesque squalor, brutal inequality and an abiding thirst for social justice. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1595581812
• ISBN 13: 9781595581815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 261