Customer Reviews

Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (Abrams Discoveries)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Beautiful color photography encompassing rites, sigils and practitioners. Documentation and historical facts interwoven with colorful descriptions of all of the above and more.

I did not know what to expect when I purchased this book. I needed a serious reference book to research Voodoo (or as I call it Vodou) in "my country" and I found it. This is a very smart and thoroughly researched and documented book that I highly recommend to anyone who has an intellectual curiosity of the Haitian Vodou culture.

If you want to know about the Voodoo religion, this book has a very clear summary of this religion. It also writes about the history of Haiti in a very clean and concise manner. And seems very true. It's not slanted or biased in any way. There are pictures of interest also. This book kept me involved in knowing Haiti's history page after page.

I have found this book interesting, delivering a most valuable information about history, loas, voodoo practices and religion. The artistic and esthetic content is also of high interest. It provides actually also a contemporary information regarding the present status of this religion and presents the christian religion coming from the US as its bitter ennemy. We will probably never ascertain the importance of the direct influence of voodoo on the present political status of Haïti, but this boook underlines the negative influence of papa Doc and his "tonto macoutes" who used voodoo to justify at times their political system.

I spent some time in Haiti but learned precious little about Voodoo. Although practiced by the majority of Haitians, it is not an open, in-your-face religion. The book has a good, detailed, historical background of both Haiti and Voodoo. The discussions about Voodoo are detailed, professional, informative, scholarly, and very non-biased. The history is quite in depth so don't buy this book if you are looking for a light hearted explanation of teh subject. This book helped me to understand Voodoo's cultural significance in Haiti and to understand why it is believed to be a "religion". The book's photos are excellent. I bought the French version of this book so I can't comment on the English translation.

Hurbon is a very fine academic and I always enjoy his well-researched books. For me, though, they do not go far enough because I would like to USE Vodou practice in my daily life. Hurbon is great on the history and traditions of Vodou but a better book for parctical information is Ross Heaven's Vodou Shaman. I'd suggest you read them both, although Hurbon's is the better for academic study.

Book is well written and informative for a pocket size book. Great photos of two Denis Smith paintings as well as other paintings. Gives you documents passed in the early 1800s on slavery which are very interesting.

As I read the book from its beginning, page after page, I grew increasingly impatient for some substantive treatment of Vodou. Instead, I found myself wading through a poor recounting of the history of Hispaniola for far too long. I was quite disappointed by the cursory explanations offered about Vodou, its pantheon of lwa, its ceremonies, and its adherents. After what I hoped was just the start of the "meat" of the book, it came to an abupt end and dumped me into the "Documents" section. As I should have noticed from the Table of Contents before buying the book on-line, a big chunk of the book is "Documents". Sa pa gen anyen landann l.