Looking for a cure for cynicism? Worried about the death of journalism? Can’t keep up with the Kardashians? My prescription: Pick up a copy of “For Whom the Dogs Spy,” the story of Haiti from the Duvalier dictatorship to the 2010 earthquake. The book, out this month, is by Raymond Joseph, one of the most remarkable newspapermen in New York (or anywhere else). With his brother Leo, he founded — and operated for decades from Brooklyn — the pro-democracy newspaper Haiti-Observateur.

Mr. Joseph never won the Pulitzer Prize, but he did win a death penalty, handed down by the Duvalier regime. (Now 83, he laughs about evading it.) He twice gave up a soaring career — in academia and journalism — to become Haiti’s envoy in Washington

I met Ray Joseph years ago, when we were both at The Wall Street Journal. Every time I encounter him, including at a Brooklyn Public Library event over the weekend, I’m astounded anew at his career. In Catholic Haiti, Joseph came from a Protestant family. He was educated in America at fundamentalist Christian schools, where he became the first person to translate the New Testament into Creole. Then he studied at the University of Chicago. Mr. Joseph dropped out of academia to enter the fight for democracy in Haiti, a struggle in which Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his playboy son “Baby Doc” would kill more than 30,000 people.

It was from the superstition that Duvalier could use Voodoo to transform dogs into spies for his regime that Joseph takes the title for his book. He turned the tables on Duvalier by building a network of informants inside the dictator’s Port-au-Prince palace. Joseph reported their findings not only in his Brooklyn broadsheet but also back to Haiti via shortwave broadcasts that became known as Radio Vonvon. (Behind-the-scenes help in setting up Vonvon came from associates of a California anti-communist — and future governor — named Ronald Reagan.)

Vonvon, which means bug, touched off a journalistic war of nerves that Hollywood couldn’t match. Papa Doc, in an effort to uncover the radio’s sources, killed 19 members of the palace guard, Joseph told his audience in Brooklyn on Sunday. Eventually, an assassin was dispatched to New York to deal with Joseph directly. But one of Mr. Joseph’s sources was on the plane, and tipped off the editor. Mr. Joseph phoned to the thug to welcome him to town — and to propose a meeting. They ended up having coffee.

This reminds me of the cat-and-mouse game that Stalin played with his journalistic nemesis here, Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward. Defectors, spies, news sources, would-be assassins flitted in and out of New York City in that epic, too. In Ray Joseph’s case, though, the editor ended up in government. This happened in the chaotic years after the Duvalier regime was toppled, when Provisional President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot came in to organize free elections. She named Joseph envoy to Washington.

When the elections handed up another villain, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Mr. Joseph went back into exile. He was editing the Observateur and writing a column for the New York Sun when Aristide was finally driven from office. That afternoon, Mr. Joseph summoned me to Brooklyn for a “small party.”

When I got there, I discovered that in a modest Brooklyn bungalow Joseph had gathered an entire government-in-exile. Mr. Joseph himself became its ambassador in Washington.

He was the ambassador when the earthquake hit in 2010, plunging him for several years into the maw of the tragedy. At the time, the Rev. Pat Robertson said that Haiti’s troubles arose from its having supposedly made, in exchange for its independence from France, a pact with the devil.

Rachel Maddow asked Joseph about that calumny on her show. His answer is particularly relevant in the wake of Wednesday’s horror in Paris.

It was only when the slaves in Haiti rose up against the French, Joseph responded, that America “was able to gain the Louisiana territory.” That was, he said, “13 states west of the Mississippi that the slaves’ revolt in Haiti provided America.”

“Also,” Joseph added, “the revolt of the rebels in Haiti allowed Latin America to be free. It was from Haiti that Simon Bolivar left with men, boats to go deliver Gran Columbia and the rest of South America. So what pact the Haitians made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is.”

A reminder that liberty anywhere is a boost to liberty everywhere — and that an attack on free speech in Paris is an attack on our freedom, too.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.