Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History Rich Benjamin ebook#
Page: 320
Format: pdf / epub / kindle
ISBN: 9780593317396
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Overview Notes From Your Bookseller An intimate and accessible story of power and politics, family and home, secrets and lies, that never loses sight of the personal costs of change. A piercingly powerful memoir, a grandson’s account of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and his urgent efforts to know his mother despite the past.“A brilliant, absorbing book...I couldn’t stop reading.” —Salman Rushdie, author of KnifeRich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn’t know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about—books, learning, world events—the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn’t just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America—of the human cost of the country’s hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.