Book Review
	The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis
	__________________________________________________________________________________________
	by Neema Bipin Avashia, May 7, 2007
	I am fully ashamed to admit this, but prior to reading Wade Davis' The Serpent and the rainbow, my understanding of "voodoo" (which isn't even the correct spelling of that word) was limited to the idea that if you create a doll-sized replica of a person, and then stick pins in it, the person will feel pain in the places where you put the pins. And zombies? (Also spelled incorrectly, as it were.) They were the blank-eyed, pale-faced ghouls who ran around killing people in the kind of horror movies that I don't even watch. In essence, my understandings were cartoonish and stereotypical, probably because they were so deeply-rooted in many years of watching "Scooby-Doo," which, by its very nature, is cartoonish and stereotypical. And the saddest part of this whole situation is that, had I not read Davis' book, I would probably still be walking around with those stereotypes in my mind right now. Davis is an ethnobotanist by profession. He studies the interplay between plant life and cultural practices, and the way the two inform each other. In the early 80s, he was approached by two physicians who had visited Haiti on numerous occasions and encountered individuals who presented as 'zombis'-they had been declared dead, buried, and then had somehow risen from the dead and re-entered society after a long absence, but often with diminished capacities and no memory as to what they'd been doing during their absence. These physicians believed that the poison used to turn a person into a zombie – to slow down their breathing and heart rate so significantly that they appear dead-might have medical uses (imagine being able to perform surgeries on a still-conscious patient who will feel and remember nothing of the surgery afterwards). They asked Davis to go to Haiti and determine the contents of the zombi poison, so that its ingredients could be tested for use in Western medical practice. Davis goes to Haiti in search of the zombi poison. Upon landing, he approaches a houngan, a voudoun priest, and requests that the houngan tell him the contents of the poison. The houngan explains that the process of turning a person into a zombi is much more complicated than Davis is making it out to be – that the poison is only a small part of the process, and that in actuality, the power to turn someone into a zombi resides in the hands of the priest who administers the poison. So begins Davis' quest to understand the voudoun religion, and the process by which someone is made a zombi. What he finds, however, is a much more complex system of secret societies, spirituality, and social norms. What he finds shatters all of the stereotypes abound voudoun and zombis that have been proliferated by years of media misrepresentation. As the book progresses, Davis delves deeper and deeper into Haitian society, and into Haitian history, and we as readers come away with a much stronger understanding of how Haiti's history of colonization and revolution influenced the development of religion that is not state-sponsored, that has its own hierarchies of power, own moral code, and own method of punishing breaches of that moral code. He challenges all prevailing assumptions about voudoun and about zombis, and renders such a detailed, nuanced analysis of the religious and spiritual practices of those who practice voudoun, that I walked away from reading The Serpent and the Rainbow simultaneously humiliated by my ignorance prior to reading, and exhilarated by what I learned in the process of reading the book. The Serpent and the Rainbow is not a "light read" in the traditional sense of that term. It's non-fiction, and it is complex, but the content is so fresh, and so skillfully rendered, that reading Davis' book is not a chore; it's a pleasure – one that has you wide-eyed and questioning with every page you turn. ________________________________ We are in a period of transition. We'll be posting once a week for now. We'll be providing more information soon. Thank you for your continued support. The next post will be Monday, May 14. During 2007, we will be donating 100 percent of our referral fees from Amazon to the Uncle Grumps Education Initiative. So, please click through us first when shopping at Amazon. The best way to keep in touch with us is to sign up on our e-mail list. You'll get a free copy of the Grump Gazette mailed to you every two weeks or so. You can sign up through the link at the top of this page or from the "Grump Gazette" icon on the homepage
	Send us your comments!