Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution by J.B. MacKinnon

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

• 
  Jan

  This is yet another of the books I picked up at a library book sale--clean, new-appearing hard cover for $2: impossible to resist! As I began reading it, I also began to reconsider my recent habit of allowing my reading diet to be dictated by the pot-luck of library book sales and my greed for cheap hard cover books. This true story is told like a modern Latin American novel, circling slowly toward "the reveal," and by slowly I mean creepingly slowly. I kept reading, though, because the book is relatively short at approximately 250 pages (unlike a Latin American novel).
  
  And now I am so glad I read it. It has to do with the revolution in 1965 in the Dominican Republic and the shooting death--murder? assassination? accident?--of a Canadian Catholic priest. His nephew many years later has come to find out more about why the uncle he never met died in this place at that time.
  
  I won't tell more. I just want to say that this is the second or third book I've read in the past 2-3 months that convinces me that the United States should QUIT--cease and desist--trying to intervene in the affairs of other countries. Over and over and over again, thinking we know best, we make things worse.
  
  WHO.DO.WE.THINK.WE.ARE?!
• 
  Leanne Martin-Pollock

  I read this about 5 years ago. Loved it and am still seeking for more of MacKinnon's work. Pls! you can even reference magazine articles! Highly recommended.
• 
  Glenn

  “Dead Man in Paradise,” is, amongst many other things, a beautiful and heart-breaking rendering of a place: clear-eyed, and without illusion, explaining and reckoning its complicated and violent history, where the meddling of our country exacerbated the struggles of everyday Dominicans; yet always maintaining a sense of openness and wonder. About what he calls the place of New World Firsts, J.B. writes in a way to give the reader not only a clear vision of the Dominican Republic, but a feeling for the emotional core of the physical. He writes “the tiny roads seemed to gather, and the miniscule cubes of campesino houses, until he finally saw the chockablock mass of the city itself.” Later in the book, describing nearly the same scene as it is viewed from the passenger seat of a Chevy Nova, he describes houses: “baseboards muddied by the force of recent rains...” There's real poetry there, and throughout, real economy of language, which makes this book not just a travelogue, but a real exploration.
  
  He explores both external and internal, especially that of memory--after all, he is investigating something that happened 42 years ago--quoting Father Joe at one point saying “these people live in their memories...they keep it in their heart...” and he fully communicates to the reader the danger and uncertainty still present, still tangible to the residents of the Domincan; in the words of the rector, Roberto Santana, who speaks of past events, but who could just as easily be speaking of the present “it is a dark thing, a cosa mala...” He also shows the discomfort of a foreigner in the country, poking at the past while those who live there still have their trying present.
  
  Early in the book, he writes “It wasn't true, but sometimes a story is more convincing than the truth.” “Dead Man in Paradise” is a mystery scrolled out by facts, by detail. J.B. spends much of his time pulling at the threads of that fact, until he truly unravels the tale of Padre Arturo, first following the trail this way, then that, to a dead-end, a false tip, then back, until the story, as much as can be uncovered, begins to coalesce. He gets across how in any investigation, whether legal or journalistic, there is always the constant feeling of being on a tightrope, of the danger of missing something. At one point, as he listens to the breakneck Spanish of a man who might represent the key to unlocking the whole mystery, he writes “I strain to keep up, all my life energy focused on his words.”
  
  There are lovely sketches of countless other individuals, each of whom provides a touch or a lot more of the tale. One of the things that J.B. does best is get out of the way and let each person tell their own story, thus enabling him to better learn Arthur's through them. And the details J.B. MacKinnon relates give us a tactile, living and vibrant picture of his uncle, Father Arthur MacKinnon. The portrait is not hagiography; Arthur is sometimes impulsive, a hardhead, seriously austere, apparently not a very good dancer. So when J.B. shows the undeniable admirable qualities, and more importantly the actions of Father Arturo, the man emerges complete, a man who acts because, as he said days before his murder about his speaking out in his sermons against the brutality in his town, in the country, “If I don't do it, no one is going to do it.” A man whose legacy still is strong in Monte Plata as a real presence, more than just a faded mural on a wall, but as a powerful reminder that good can be done in the world, and though the brutality of evil can try to erase that good and deny justice to that that seek it, the good done by people like Arthur MacKinnon remains still.
• 
  Ricardo

  El autor investiga el asesinato de su tío sacerdote ocurrido en la República Dominicana durante la fallida revolución de 1965. Muestra los horrores del pasado reciente en ese país y la impunidad todavía existente con respecto a los crímenes de aquella época. El autor describe sus experiencias presentes en la República Dominicana con sus cosa buenas y también las malas. Excelentes descripciones de la gente, la cultura local y los paisajes. Buenísimo.
• 
  Cobar B

  4.5 stars for the excellent prose, the challenging read and brilliant research.
• 
  Donald Schopflocher

  True story of a nephew’s quest to understand a priest’s murder in the DR 40 years earlier. Weaves DR history from the fall of Trujillo seamlessly into its narrative and provides insight into the long and difficult transition from brutal dictatorship to democracy.
• 
  Sonja

  A relative of the dead man travels to the Dominican Republic to find out how his uncle died. The author might not have gotten away unharmed if he'd have been forcefully demanding answers to his questions.
• 
  Michael Schmidt

  Seldom does a work of historical investigation manage so delicate a balance between poetic nuance and forensic judgment, but it is even rarer for a journalistic probe into the mysterious death of a family member four decades ago in a foreign country to manage to illuminate the nature of an entire people and country, an illumination all the more powerful for its inability to penetrate, and yet at least to delineate, certain recalcitrant shadows.
  The only book I know to do something similar is Martin Pollack’s The Dead Man in the Bunker (1998) in which he pursues the truth about his long-dead father’s hidden past as an SS officer, which reveals almost more about the roots of anti-Slavic racism among Germans living in the borderlands of what became the Third Reich than it does about his own family.
  The Dominican Republic is a country that has, unlike my own South Africa, or the more directly comparable Chile or Guatemala, not undergone the flawed-yet-purgative process of a sort of “truth and reconciliation commission” after emerging from decades of authoritarianism. South Africa’s commission was blessed by being covered by a radio journalism team lead by the poet Antjie Krog, which resulted in her harrowing book Country of My Skull (1998).
  But for want of such an official inquiry exhuming its skeletons, the Dominican Republic, that forgotten Caribbean land of caudillismo, exquisite fruits, genocide, and crystal waters, at least has the interlocution of Canadian journalist James MacKinnon’s breathtaking true tale of his dogged search, stumbling in poor Spanish, for the truth behind the weird murder of his uncle, Catholic priest Arthur MacKinnon, at the height of the popular revolution that broke out in April of 1965.
  With a robust passion for the Dominican downtrodden, Padre Arturo was a natural mark as a trouble-making “red” for cold warriors like General Elias Wessin y Wessin, the tank brigade commander whose forces battled the youth of the revolution in the capital Santo Domingo until the US, fearing a second Cuba, landed Marines in May 1965 and the clock stopped.
  But what then to make of the fact that in June 1965, alongside Arturo’s bullet-riddled body were two more gunned-down corpses – one a uniformed police lieutenant and one a plain-clothed police corporal – and while the dead cops are suspected of assassinating the priest, it appears that an army soldier may have gunned the cops down in turn, insuring 39 years of silence, in a country that harbours its silences?
  Who killed who, who gave the orders if there were orders, and why? Amid the suggestions of a political plot with a “blush of communism” lurks a possible motive of a cuckolded lover. But in a country struggling to come to terms with its past, nothing is as it seems and few answers are straightforward.
  MacKinnon has an amazing eye for detail and a poetic sense of mood, plot, pace, dialogue and of place: “I can see the fires on the slopes as farmers clear the underbrush. In between them are valleys filled with flame trees, all of them ferociously in bloom. The canopy of flowers is the same colour as the embers that glow from the earth.”
  What he has produced is a tour de force in what I term forensic meditation, the painstaking reconstruction of a scene of damage and loss, sifting through the evidence to strip away the layers of accumulated obfuscation, restoring its original simple brutality to the scorching light of the Caribbean sun, and in doing so, revealing many truths about themselves to the Dominican people.
• 
  P.D.R. Lindsay

  
  This book is the winner of the 2006 Canadian award for the best non-fiction. It's a sad frustrating read if you care about Central and South America, showing clearly the damage done through constant interference by the United States.
  
  MacKinnon is the nephew of Father James Arthur MacKinnon, a Catholic missionary priest murdered by government soldiers in the Dominican Republic. Father James was shot during the American occupation of the Republic in 1965, because he spoke out against the terror tactics in his parish.
  
  Growing up with the story, but not the details, which no one seemed to be able to discover, MacKinnon decided find out for himself. The book explains what happens as the writer travels in the Republic seeking answers. Was his uncle's death 'an orchestrated assassination' or was it, as the then government insisted, an accidental shooting?
  
  Father James' story is told in short chapters between MacKinnon's research, and an excellent history of the doomed Republic. In the end MacKinnon arrives at a solution which seems to fit the events as he heard them from everyone and the medical reports of the bullet holes in his uncle's body. With this he is content and it satisfied this reader too.
  
  Well worth reading to understand the damage one country can do by interfering. Also well worth reading as an excellent example of non-fiction writing, balanced and carefully researched.
• 
  Kai Coates

  Interesting narrative of a young man's search for the truth about his uncle's murder in the Dominican Republic. MacKinnon has done an admirable job of describing a very turbulent time surrounded by decades of corruption, lies, and foreign intervention. This is a place of many secrets and many reasons to keep those secrets. When you think of murder mysteries, you expect and ending that neatly wraps everything up with a bow: the murderer confessing and explaining his motives before being taken into custody. Unfortunately, real life isn't a Scooby Doo mystery or even a spy thriller. MacKinnon goes in search of who was responsible for his uncle's murder and finds an entire society and time to blame.
• 
  Dawn

  I do rather feel bad about rating this book so low. I only finished to the end of Chapter 10 and unfortunately the story just has not and did not capture my attention.
  I'll call it an experiment that didn't pan out. I do not read non-fiction books about specific people (typically), I like overarching histories of large periods of time or involving many countries or about many generations of a famous family. This story was personal and intimate, a young man trying to find the truth about an uncles murder and it didn't appeal to me.
• 
  Barbara

  This is an excellant account of how the author investigated the murder of his uncle, a Catholic priest in the early 1960's in the Dominican Republic. The author's description of his journey is made vivid with descriptions of the Dominican way of life, landscape, and culture. The author also documents his own fear as he investigated this 40 year old murder. His courage in attempting to get to the bottom of the murder is admirable. It is a very compelling read.
• 
  Dave

  I don't read much stuff like this but the author also has a book on localization and another one that sounds like it's probably about rewilding so I figured it wouldn't be too bad. And it's not. It's well written, mixes in a good amount of humor and history. I never really got too in to the murder mystery though. Just not my thing.
• 
  Susan B

  sometimes too many characters to follow but a good payoff in the end
• 
  Dsinglet

  Non fiction account of a nephew searching for the cause of his uncles death in Dominican Republic