SOURCE: "The Sword and the Saviour," in The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1993, pp. 1, 34.

Gates is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on African-American and third-world black literature. In the following highly positive review of No Other Life, he compares Moore's fictional Father Jeannot of Ganae to Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti and asserts that, by using a white narrator to provide a retrospective account of Jeannot's career, Moore allows his novel to be read "as an allegory of the relationship of the first world to the third."

Political exile gives birth to its own mythology—tales of injustice and desire that the survivors tell one another to assuage their guilt, to keep faith with the past, to cast light into the shadows that define the state of exile itself. For the Haitian taxi drivers who queue each day at Harvard Square, one sentence...