Bookshelf - June 2025

Jack Kerouac in Orlando, Florida, 1958.

This month’s dispatch finds me bookended between two periods of travel. A few weeks ago, I spent several days in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince (you can read about what I found here) and early in July, thanks to the hospitality and generosity of a friend of mine, I am going to be able to travel for the first time to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, with visits to Barranquilla, Santa Marta and the Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona to try and recharge my batteries a little bit amid a new round of chemo by surrounding myself with the costeño joie de vivre and dipping my head under ocean and waterfall.  Though I have been to Bogotá and Antioquia several times, this will be my first visit to this part of the country and I am mightily looking forward to it.

Since February 2023, despite health issues and such, I have managed to make four trips to Haiti, three of them to its embattled capital , Port-au-Prince. The dispatches from these visit - This is the End (February 2023), Ayiti, mon amour (February 2024), Ready to Burst (October 2024) and Letter from Port-au-Prince (June 2025) - can be read via the links in the preceding titles. With one notable exception, these trips were almost entirely self-funded from what is a very modest (to put it mildly) income, but with so few foreign journalists traveling to Port-au-Prince and Haiti in general these days, I think this level of reportage from a Creole-speaking reporter with almost 30 years experience in the country was and remains important. With a situation so changeable and complex, I don’t think one can report on Haiti from New York or Miami or Mexico City or Bogotá (some legacy media have felt free to make up for that by helping themselves to my content without compensation). Though going out hat in hand does not come naturally to me, if this kind of reporting is of value to you, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber to Notes from the World at wherever level is comfortable to you.

In terms of what has been crossing my reading list this month, it has been an interesting variety tackling a range of subjects and geographic locales.