Never the Hope Itself

June 6, 2011
Former NPR correspondent Hadden's offbeat, gripping memoir relates his experiences covering migrations, earthquakes, and revolutions in Latin America in the first years of the 21st century. On the verge of becoming a Buddhist monk, Hadden was offered a job as NPR's Latin America correspondent. From his base in Mexico, Hadden dashed around the region, finding himself among arms smugglers in Panama, desperate migrants in El Salvador, and on the bloody streets of Port-au-Prince as Haiti lurched from one crisis to the next. Hadden ties together the disparate narrative with his own story of romance and betrayal in a haunted house in Mexico City. He deftly builds momentum to his biggest storyâthe plight of Central American migrantsâsetting it against the backdrop of post-9/11 America. He also narrates personal dramas that involve strongly defined characters, poltergeists, an exorcism, and a love story with a happy ending. It's the rare journalist who shows such a mystical bent, but Hadden's quirks and openness give his book a rare charm. Photos.

June 15, 2011

Exciting, heart-wrenching dispatches among the poor and disenfranchised of Haiti and Latin America.

Instead of embarking on a meditation retreat, Hadden suddenly got a dream job offer from NPR and was sent first to Mexico City, just as Vicente Fox was gaining election as president in 2000, then to Haiti, where pro– and anti–Jean-Bertrand Aristide factions were threatening to derail an important election. In succinct, polished chapters, the author recounts his attempts to cover the action, interviewing Fox and watching over time the unraveling of his promised "guest worker" programs sanctioned by the United States. Gradually, Hadden gleaned the more complicated, real story, involving corruption, drug smuggling and waves of perilous human migration to the north. To cover America's war on drugs, the author dragged a terrified "fixer" with him on a dangerous expedition through the Darien Gap separating Panama from Colombia, through which shipments of guns passed—literally the same guns the U.S. had paid for ("same defects, same serial numbers, different fingers on the triggers") to conduct previous Central American conflicts. American indifference and inattention both to Latin America and Haiti had sown deep poverty and resentment in the respective regions, and 9/11 did not soften feelings against their untrustworthy neighbor to the north. In Haiti, Hadden attended a ghastly all-night Voodoo ceremony intended to help get Aristide elected, and visited the Duvalier dictators' former prison on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where children pranced on the beach and gleefully showed the author human bones that remained from the time of abundant executions. While Hadden was chasing stories for the radio, he also lived in a haunted house in Mexico City, helped a Guatemalan fixer through personal trauma and fell in love with a young married French woman.

Grim, sobering tales fashioned by a terrific writer brave enough to unearth the real story.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011
As NPR's neophyte correspondent for Latin America, Hadden was virtually thrown into the lion's den when his initial assignments asked him to cover everything from diabolically corrupt elections in Haiti to Mexico's charismatic presidential candidate, Vicente Fox. Moving precipitously from his previous life path, training as a Buddhist monk, Hadden found himself instantaneously confronted with the best and worst humanity has to offer. From the Caribbean to the Andes, Hadden's beat took him to some of the world's most dangerous environments and embedded him among its most deprived cultures. As he traversed fetid waters, dodged earthquake debris, and crawled through unspeakable squalor following his stories, Hadden never lost sight of the journalist's true goal: to bring to light and life those stories, large and small, that can impact both the individual and society as a whole. A superb communicator and stalwart reporter, Hadden brings personal compassion and professional craft to this shining insider's glimpse at the people and events that shape the news.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)