A reader knowledgeable of the business community in the City shared their thoughts on the list of Corporate Leaders for Spitzer, which was unveiled at a small press conference in the Grand Hyatt yesterday.

The list includes:

--Roger Altman
A close confident of Hillary Clinton, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasurey, and someone whose private equity firm, Evercore Partners, just went public.

--Alan Patricof
A fundraiser for Hillary and a Democratic operative

--Michael Carey
Former Governor Hughe Carey's son who was fired by the Bloomberg administration. The younger Carey wanted to be the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation, and Bloomberg's people said no.

-- John Dyson
Deputy Mayor for Economic Development under Rudy Giuliani, and is now an active fundraiser for the Brenan Center (the people who called the state legislature "dysfunctional" and the worst in the nation.)

--Blair Effron
An active Democratic political operative who probably played a role in brining together the entire list of Corporate Leaders for Spitzer.

--Robert Pitman
Sold AOL to Timewarner

--Lewis Ranieri
Along with Alfonse D'Amatao, was almost removed from the board of CA Inc., after a scandal-plagued era at the company.

--Steve Rattner
Head of Democrats for Bloomberg, and one of the deep-pocketed Democratic contributors who closed his wallet to Freddy Ferrer's campaign.

--Richard Ravitch
A Bloomberg supporter who went to war with Dan Doctoroff and City Hall to block the West Side Stadium deal.

--Wilbur Ross
Ex husband of George Pataki's first lieutenent governor, the one who famously refused to sit down during a state of the state address.

--Henry Silverman
Pataki's appointee on the Port Authority, whose company has had some legal trouble.

-- Azi Paybarah

Evercore Partners

55 East 52nd Street

New York, N.Y. 10055

Dear Roger:

You may recall that I wrote you a couple of years ago in connection with some ideas for the Kerry campaign. I didn’t hear back, which didn’t surprise me, although now that I think about it, the fact that I gave you your first job in investment banking, from which you have springboarded to ever greater visibility and prominence, might have entitled me to the minor courtesy of a rubber-stamp acknowledgement.

You may also recall that I sent along a copy of an unpublished book I wrote back in 1992, about where I thought this country was headed wrong and what to do about it. That the book never saw publication looks in retrospect to have been a pity, since all of the more dire prognostications I laid out have come true. Making those predictions required no genius on my part, although it did take a form of thinking conspicuously absent in what I then described as the American “overclass”: intellectual honesty, not to mention a touch of moral imagination.

In the book, I also put forward a number of prescriptive notions—some radical in fact, others only so in perception—that basically involved the application of common sense both to the way we live now and to the way we seem quite happy to see others live. Among these were suggestions regarding Congressional pay and staffing, a sensible tax structure, market-based incentives for individual educational accomplishment and so on.

My purpose in writing that book was to suggest, by example if you will, that it is no longer practical, even if eminently feasible, to attack the ills that beset this great Republic with further dosages of bullshit, although I recognize that in some circles this substance—of which Professor Harry G. Frankfurt has written with uncommon eloquence—is thought to have the same therapeutic effect on overclass social guilt that Zoloft does on clinical depression.

And that brings me to the Hamilton Project, The Wall Street Journal report on which prompted me to look up your Web site and download the mission statement. This I read with great interest, several times, and what I read prompts me now to write to urge that you and your colleagues in this amazingly self-congratulatory undertaking cease and desist.

I say this in a kindly, even condolatory way. The “Project” has absolutely no chance of success—unless, of course, you equate (and it occurs to me that by now you may) a certain measure of P.R. exposure with achievement. For one thing, there are no new ideas in the statement. “Economic security and economic growth can be mutually reinforcing” is not a new idea, nor is any to be found in the page-long gloss that follows the enunciation of this bold new “principle.” If I may paraphrase Churchill’s well-known apothegm on the late Soviet Union, what we have here is platitude wrapped in cliché inside bromide—over and over and over. And this begs the question, for this nation at least, of a nation-fixing mission statement that nowhere (unless I am blind) includes the word “immigration.”

Another reason that the “Project” has absolutely no chance of success is—how am I going to put this gently?—the people behind it. Your advisory council consists of 25 individuals. Of these, 12 come from Wall Street, broadly considered. I cannot say for sure whether experience in grossly overpaid lines of work such as hedge funds and derivatives trading and private equity and giving merger advice equips one to understand, let alone deal with, the vexations—such as how to get a job, pay the doctor, put food on the table—faced by the people in this country we need to worry about, but it seems conjectural at best.

Another 10 members of your advisory council come from academe, which requires no further comment—a consideration that also applies to the member who comes from the never-neverland of management consulting. Two others make their home in think tanks. At a time when enterprises like General Motors and Ford are back-to-wall, one might have thought some representation from the make-and-do and hire-and-fire sectors of American commerce would have proved helpful, even insightful. Perhaps even someone from Wal-Mart.

That said, I have no doubt that the “Project” will achieve its real goals. It will commission studies, enable consultants, stage conferences and symposia and panels, publish full-page newspaper ads, generate press coverage and the like, in the same inspiring manner as its ancestor in blather, the Concord Coalition of blessed memory.

But is this really the point? If there were some way to monetize self-congratulation, or to convert into B.T.U.’s the energy released by stroking the chin while gravely pursing the lips, I would argue otherwise. But the chances seem twofold: slim and none. The sad truth seems to be, at least in the eyes of one who has spent enough time at the Four Seasons to have a sense of how this stuff works, that this really isn’t a program about helping the less-advantaged or getting the country straightened out in a fiscal and intellectual sense; this is an advertisement for a government-in-waiting.

In conclusion, let me say that this letter is written in darkest self-interest. The day you receive this letter, I shall turn 70. Years ago, I took my design for living from a famous New Yorker cartoon, in which a very fancy mother says to her child, “Eat your broccoli, dear,” and the kid, after inspecting his plate dubiously, replies, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it!” The sun will soon enough go down for the last time for me, and already the chances are that its final twinkling rays will be blotted out by the giant mounds of spinach with which the American landscape has been heaped by self-aggrandizing Panglosses in pinstripes. I beg you not to add to the pile.

As always,

Michael

This is just one of many fascinating issues raised by the recent emergence of the multibillion-dollar industry that Debora L. Spar examines in The Baby Business. A Harvard Business School professor and chair of a program called “Making Markets Work,” Ms. Spar wrote The Baby Business for the Harvard Business School Press. Unfortunately, despite its timeliness and pedigree, the book fails to provide either a thorough description of the remarkable developments in this field or a usable framework for analyzing them. Ms. Spar consistently deploys economic and business jargon in ways that are either unhelpful or inconsistent with the raw facts as she herself presents them.

Her central premise is that “infants and children are indeed being sold” and that, rather than pretend they are not, we should analyze this “market” to ensure that it operates appropriately. The “market” encompasses everything from adoption to in vitro fertilization to high-tech procedures to eliminate birth defects. As soon as she turns to the supposed characteristics of this market, however, Ms. Spar runs into trouble. Demand in the fertility market, she claims, “is nearly constant,” with “the crucial fact [being] that 10 to 15 percent of any given population” is infertile. Yet the data provided demonstrate that a woman’s age is the single biggest variable in the likelihood of a successful pregnancy. Presumably, therefore, the fact that women are systematically waiting longer and longer to have children is inconsistent with the “crucial fact” of “nearly constant” demand.

Though she includes plenty of charts and statistics, Ms. Spar’s methodology is essentially anecdotal. She describes a hypothetical situation in order to suggest that fertility clinics have an economic incentive to continue to provide expensive treatments to largely hopeless cases. Only five pages later, however, she quotes clinic directors to the effect that some service providers refuse to treat difficult cases because published “success” statistics are an important marketing tool. It’s all true, I’m sure—but Ms. Spar doesn’t even acknowledge the inconsistency of the two observations, much less make any effort to analyze whether, on a net basis, the “market” is providing too much or too little treatment.

Her essentially journalistic approach sometimes wanders into tabloid territory: “Most [sperm bank] recipients … never want their offspring to know that Daddy arrived via FedEx.”

There’s nothing wrong with an objective, journalistic approach per se, but Ms. Spar seems to strain to avoid expressing any substantive point of view on the myriad controversies touched on in her narrative. The one broad argument she does make isn’t particularly compelling: this single “market” demands a single, holistic regulatory regime.

It’s actually impossible to judge this argument on its merits because, after 200 pages, Ms. Spar declines to say what specific regulatory regime she would propose. How can we be expected to compare the current fragmented regulatory framework with an integrated one to be named later? The justification for punting on the core thesis of the book is equally unsatisfactory: “[T]he baby business,” she offers by way of explanation, “is running so quickly and expanding so radically that time is likely to render any detail moot.”

Instead, we’re encouraged to engage in a healthy, open political dialogue to develop the best framework. To help us along, Ms. Spar mentions a variety of principles and factors that could shape the debate. These do not amount to a roadmap: Be equitable, she tells us, and take into account the cost of any proposal.

Strangely absent from Ms. Spar’s calculus of conception are the children that it produces. In all the pages describing factors and variables to be weighed, she barely mentions (and then only parenthetically) the governing principle in most family-law cases: the best interests of the child. In her description of the adoption “market,” Ms. Spar oddly describes “open” adoption (which she defines as a system in which “birth parents actually choose the adoptive parents and the child is fully informed”) as a “radical” fringe phenomenon. But some type of openness—one form or another of continuing communication between the birth parents and the child—is the general trend rather than the exception. Significantly, the regulatory movement for openness was driven by the generation of adopted children who came of age in the second half of the last century. The interests that Ms. Spar focuses on almost exclusively are those of the parties to the “transaction” in the “marketplace.” My guess is that whatever regulatory regime or mosaic of different regimes takes hold in the future will be largely driven by the children who are born thanks to the recent wave of technological innovation.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

If anyone could fill this role—a living icon who embodies the best of a vocation in crisis—it would be John C. Whitehead, the 83-year-old chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Mr. Whitehead worked at Goldman Sachs from 1947 to 1984, the last eight years as co-chairman. Between his departure from Goldman Sachs and his current appointment by Governor George Pataki in 2001, Mr. Whitehead served as Deputy Secretary of State under George Shultz, as well as chairman of the New York Fed and leader of literally dozens of nonprofit boards, from the International Rescue Committee to the United Nations Association.

A Life in Leadership is Mr. Whitehead’s crisp, no-nonsense autobiography. Not a particularly introspective man, he lays out his life and career, identifies what he sees as the highs and the lows, and proposes a handful of overarching principles that might be of use to the general reader. But although discretion is an admirable quality in an investment banker, diplomat and leader, it doesn’t necessarily make for a particularly revealing autobiography. There are times when this reader yearned for Mr. Whitehead to break out of character and dish a little dirt. Though he gently chides his adversaries in business and public life (for a Republican, he has surprisingly little time for either Bush père or fils), one is left to speculate on the full scope of the conflicts that led to Mr. Whitehead’s occasional, somewhat cryptic aspersions.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss this autobiography as simply an unrevealing effort by an old man to provide an official record of his accomplishments. In particular, one cannot read the 60 pages of A Life in Leadership devoted to Mr. Whitehead’s career at Goldman Sachs without being overwhelmed both by the magnitude of his contribution to the investment-banking industry and the contrast to the values that prevail there today.

Early in Mr. Whitehead’s Goldman career, he became assistant to the legendary Sidney Weinberg, who led the institution from 1930 almost until his death in 1969. In addition to working with Weinberg on a wide array of projects, including the 1956 Ford I.P.O. that represented Goldman’s arrival as a major investment-banking player, Mr. Whitehead did something quite remarkable that changed Goldman—and investment banking—forever. Against some significant internal resistance, he institutionalized the greatness of Sidney Weinberg.

Mr. Whitehead realized that with Weinberg well into his 70’s, the firm was at risk, because all of its relationships were really Weinberg’s. Mr. Whitehead accordingly established a regionally organized “New Business Department” that would not only provide institutional continuity for Weinberg’s relationships, but also actively call on a targeted list of other corporations within assigned geographies. This latter role was revolutionary at the time; it was then viewed as unseemly to actually solicit business. But by establishing the function and imbuing it with the values of Sidney Weinberg—client loyalty, integrity, first-class service—Goldman created a sales infrastructure and a network of deep corporate relationships that not only survived Weinberg, but ultimately took Goldman to the global leadership position it still holds today. (When Mr. Whitehead established the department, Goldman was ranked only 15th among investment banks.)

Mr. Whitehead notes with some pride that an early memo he produced with nine basic principles for new business bankers to follow still adorns the wall of at least one Goldman banker. I can report that the memo circulates to this day, surreptitiously faxed and e-mailed: I’ve seen photocopies of it in the offices of wise bankers at every major institution on the street. A Life in Leadership reproduces the memo in full.

Mr. Whitehead doesn’t pause to reflect on the metamorphosis of the investment-banking industry in the two decades since his retirement from Goldman. Always circumspect, he claims that his early concerns that Goldman’s “transformation to a publicly owned company” might undermine its commitment to “the emphasis on always acting in the client’s interest … the importance of teams [and] holding to high ethical standards” were overblown. Rather weakly, he asserts that the firm has maintained these values “pretty well” and, in any case, “on the whole, better than the others”—hardly a ringing endorsement of either his alma mater or the industry.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect Mr. Whitehead to second-guess his successors in an industry whose finer qualities he helped establish. The decency and humility on display in this book provide a striking counterpoint to the attitude of most big-shot investment bankers of the current era. And if leading by example is what John Whitehead means to do, maybe his character is the most powerful lesson of A Life in Leadership. The values of today’s conglomerate investment bankers—focused on the short term, obsessed with self-promotion, heedless of apparent conflicts—are not the only values. If we hope to recapture a different industry ethos, this book should be required reading for all new hires.

Jonathan A. Knee, a Goldman Sachs investment banker in the 1990’s, is now director of the media program at Columbia Business School and a senior managing director at Evercore Partners.

In a profession dominated by nerds, intellectual property (I.P.) lawyers have long served the useful role of letting other lawyers feel that at least they're not the nerdiest. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that in recent years we've seen a number of prominent I.P. scholars aggressively reinvent themselves as more accessible public intellectuals. The most notable example of this is Stephen Carter, who went from soft-spoken I.P. professor to Presidential adviser (on bioethics), then on to highly paid best-selling novelist.

The Internet boom has provided a more obvious and systematic path for scholars to pull themselves out of the I.P. ghetto and contribute to a debate of interest and relevance to a broad audience: one day cocooned in the dry arcana of copyright, trademark and patent law, the next spreading your wings as a new breed of legal superhero, the cyber-lawyer. Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and chair of something called the Creative Commons project, is probably the most prolific and influential of the I.P. scholars newly blessed with Internet street cred. Free Culture, Mr. Lessig's latest book, is a provocative and engaging polemic against The Man for trying to keep down his peeps hanging on the Net.

Free Culture comes in two distinct parts. I will focus here on the longer first part, which is a highly entertaining but utterly unconvincing argument for a fundamental rethinking of how we regulate creative content in the Internet era. The second part, which seems like an afterthought, is a poignant chronicle of Mr. Lessig's unsuccessful effort to have the latest legislative extension of copyright protections declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Lessig weaves together a tapestry of charming anecdote, history, and economic and legal theory to lead us to his conclusion that copyright regulation must be scaled back dramatically. His core argument is that the combined impact of three factors-"changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology"-cries out for what he euphemistically refers to as certain "adjustments" to the law that would, in his view, "restore the balance that has traditionally defined" the relationship between the legal protections of creative property and the ability of anyone to engage in unfettered creativity.

Mr. Lessig is on firmest ground with respect to the "changing law" element of his thesis. During the first 150 years of our history, the maximum copyright term was extended only twice (from 28 years to 42 to 56); since 1962, however, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights 11 times to the current 95 years-which does seem like an awfully long time. Particularly compelling is Mr. Lessig's argument that any retroactive extension of copyrights-as many of the recent extensions have been-serves no useful social purpose.

Mr. Lessig is on shakiest ground when he tries to demonstrate that element of his argument which he concedes is most critical to his overall thesis: "In my view, all of these [other] changes would not matter much if it weren't for … [t]he change in the concentration and integration of media [over] the past twenty years." Here, instead of any kind of systematic argument, Mr. Lessig offers random anecdotes and statistics, some of which actually undercut his position: "There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United States. The top ten film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue. The ten largest cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenues. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to protect." That adds up to 40 major media voices (actually 38, since one studio is also a newspaper publisher and another studio is also a cable company), and that doesn't include radio (satellite and terrestrial) and television broadcasters, cable programmers, multichannel satellite services or Internet content providers. Ironically, Mr. Lessig repeatedly cites Intel, a company with a greater than 80 percent market share in its industry, as the paradigm of a forward-looking company sympathetic to "free culture."

Of course there's been consolidation. But fragmentation of media has occurred significantly faster, resulting in less market power, not more. The same is true with respect to copyright law and changes in technology: New technologies mean I.P. regulation covers things it did not before, but the realm of the free and unregulated-as Mr. Lessig himself documents well when he describes the explosion of "blogs"-has grown much more quickly.

Mr. Lessig ends his argument with this "astonishing conclusion": "Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Never." If you think this statement accurately describes the world in which we now live, I'm not likely to change your mind. But if, like me, you think that we're living in a world where the barriers to "cultural" entry have never been lower, then you'll be curious to see how Mr. Lessig managed to end up somewhere so far from reality.

You'll have to read closely: His accessible style gives his polemic an air of reasonableness even when it is at its thinnest.

Extremists on the other side make Mr. Lessig seem downright sensible. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, claims that intellectual property should be treated like any other property under the law, whereas, in fact, the Constitution has a specific provision that allows Congress to secure intellectual property rights of "Author and Inventors" only for "limited Times." But Mr. Lessig's own arguments are similarly flawed: He suggests that the Constitution's free-speech provisions should somehow be read to require that the "limited Times" be very limited indeed. Again and again, Mr. Lessig subtly overstates his historic, practical or legal case-and, in the end, his credibility is undermined. To claim that Mr. Valenti's admittedly extreme position has "no reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition," for instance, ignores that the British common-law rule (which is arguably close to Mr. Valenti's position) was the law in this country until the first federal copyright statute was enacted in 1790.

At times, it seems that Mr. Lessig is using the advent of the Internet as a pretext to pursue a radical copyright-policy agenda. Many of the points he makes about the impact of new technology could have been made with the advent of the Xerox machine. Creativity survived the Xerox machine and will survive the Internet without the need for a fundamentally different legal regime. Indeed, the essential impact of the Internet is that it has dramatically lowered the barriers to both accessing and sharing all forms of creative output. That's why many of the examples Mr. Lessig cites to justify his proposals-restrictions on e-books or barriers to the creation of a digital archive-seem trivial in comparison with the explosion of new creative output that we experience all around us.

To be fair, some of Lawrence Lessig's policy proposals seem sensible, and might even be helpful at the margins. But the idea that they could have a meaningful impact on the ability of "Big Media" to "lock down culture and control creativity" is something only a nerdy I.P. lawyer would believe.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.

A Sad, True Novel About Haiti

The Dew Breaker , by Edwidge Danticat. Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $22.

Only a few hours away by luxury jet lies an island paradise of palm trees and warm sand where the air itself feels forgiving. Lovely chocolate-skinned women wear pink nightgowns, jacarandas grow wild and the customary old-fashioned way to say "You're welcome" is to say "You're deserving." It's a charmed place where "the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter," and the clouds in the sky are said to be caused by dear, departed relatives eating coconuts with God. Eating Coconuts with God , in fact, wouldn't be a bad title for a lighthearted book about such a quaintly blessed place. Except there's a hitch: Bloodshed is rampant.

And so the title of Edwidge Danticat's new novel about Haiti is not Eating Coconuts with God , but rather The Dew Breaker ; it's named for the central character, a professional government torturer whose M.O. was to "break into your house … before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves." He'd break the dew, then systematically break your bones.

Recent news photos from this island are notable mostly for the numbing sense of déjà vu they engender in the viewer. Chrome guns gleam in black hands, frenzied crowds jubilate in the streets by stomping the heads of political opponents, an air of grim festivity pervades, like a World Series victory celebration gone mad. Haiti is again aswirl with wide-smiling violence; the air that should reek of bougainvillea is once more perfumed with gunpowder.

In prose as supple and deadpan as the tropical landscape she describes, Ms. Danticat colors in the blanks behind the headlines. A pot-bellied police officer smells "like fried eggs and gasoline, like breakfast at the Amoco." Traumatized victims gibber in their sleep, wetting their beds "not with urine but with words." Innocent bystanders tend "to be silent a moment too long during an important conversation and then say too much." Others simply go bananas, like the father who manifests his insanity by "walking naked to the marketplace twice a week, clutching a rock in each fist." Yet life, perforce, goes on. Here's ordinary daily sexual yearning, as felt by a husband for a wife who has finally come from Haiti to join him in his rented American basement room after a separation of years: "She smelled good, a mixture of lavender and lime. He simply wanted to get her home, if home it was … and to reduce the space between them until there was no air for her to breathe that he was not breathing too."

Ms. Danticat has set herself a sacred mission: to give weight and dignity to those whose grainy faces we glimpse between sips of our morning coffee, "men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives." She writes about them in a voice that's so surprisingly flat as to be almost inert, as though run through a wringer.

Each chapter features a different character, nearer to or farther from the heart of darkness-violence engulfs even those distant from the epicenter. The reader needs to be something of a locksmith to fit the pieces together. "It's like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle, man," one of the characters remarks, and you won't master all the connections until the closing pages, when it clicks into place with the aha of satisfaction. But the satisfaction is a hurtful one, radiating as it does from the central character, the eponymous dew breaker, who claims the final chapter for himself.

"One of hundreds who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again," this torturer is not a nice fellow. "He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives. He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them, tie blocks of concrete to the end of sisal ropes and balance them off their testicles if they were men or their breasts if they were women." Perhaps the ultimate unforgivable injustice he commits is this: "He'd wound you, then try to soothe you with words, then he'd wound you again. He thought he was God."

Yet it's the singular achievement of this novel to make us feel bad for the bad guy. Who can be privy to his rationalizations and guilt, his familial love and childhood dreams, without acknowledging that even he-especially he-has within him the seeds of redemption? "You and me, we save him," his wife tells his daughter, when she learns the truth. "When I meet him, it made him stop hurt the people. This how I see it. He a seed thrown in rock. You, me, we make him take root."

The wistful contends with the brutish. The ghastliest atrocities-facial scalping "where skin was removed from dead victims' faces to render them unidentifiable," whipping the soles of the feet till they bleed, making casual foes drink a gallon of gas and then lighting a match-are counterbalanced by paeans to human beauty: eyes that are "chartreuse" or "velvet-brown," skin that is "the color of sorrel" or "silken and very black, her few wrinkles … more like beauty marks than signs of old age." Or this: "Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out."

These details are delivered languidly, leaf by leaf, as it were, like the leaves falling from the green ash trees, "shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze … seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles." As they accumulate-the details of beauty no less inexorably than the details of torture-they acquire the specific gravity of truth.

Here we learn exactly what it feels like to inhabit a body that is no longer your own: "The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire …. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he'd tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards and cracks in the concrete."

In one of those odd quirks of human convergence, Jackie Onassis, diminutively disembarking a queen-sized yacht one day back in the 1970's, apparently made a vivid impression on the natives of Haiti. They liked her style. They liked her pink Bermuda shorts and her wide-rimmed sunglasses. Most of all, they liked her grace: "She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful."

With her grace and her imperishable humanity, her devotion to lives lived like "a pendulum between forgiveness and regret," Edwidge Danticat is every bit Jackie's equal. About her, too, it can be said: She makes sadness beautiful.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer .