Pierre Toussaint

Born a slave in Haiti in 1781, Pierre Toussaint survived the bloody Haitian revolution and made his way to New York, where he became a much sought-after hairdresser. Coping with war, racism and changing coiffures with equal aplomb, Toussaint was stylist and confidant to the city's richest women (he numbered Alexander Hamilton's wife and granddaughter among his clients), becoming both a fixture in white society and a pillar of the black and Catholic communities. Through this sociologically fascinating figure, Jones, an editor for the National Catholic Reporter and author of Capitalism and Christians, explores the economy and society of pre-revolutionary Haiti and early Republican New York, the culture of Caribbean-French expatriates, and the racial and ethnic tensions within the American Catholic Church. Unfortunately, this often illuminating commentary is overshadowed by the author's hagiographic agenda. There is a movement afoot to have Toussaint canonized, and Jones seems eager to advance it by spotlighting his kindness to widows and orphans, selfless ministrations to the sick and dying, and willingness to run incessant personal errands for friends, all despite his own 70-hour workweek. Through it all, Toussaint remains a""cheerful, refined, loving, religious and considerate"" man,""funny"" and""imaginative"" but with""an aura of personal dignity,"" who""tried to live the beatitudes"" and whose""pity for the suffering seemed to partake of the character of the Savior's tenderness."" To polish Toussaint's halo, Jones periodically interrupts his disjointed narrative with lengthy quotations from a mountain of adoring letters, eulogies and miscellaneous tributes, which distract from the book's interesting historical content.