Brother I'm Dying

by Edwidge Danticat

Brother I'm Dying

published

September 2007 by Recorded Books

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binding

Audio CD

literary awards

National Book Critics Circle Award (2007)

isbn

1428166289 (isbn13: 9781428166288)

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1016)

All ratings | 5 stars (194) | 4 stars (207) | 3 stars (90) | 2 stars (9) | avg 4.18

all | this edition

Tam

Tam rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

09/18/08

This is a heartbreaking, soul mending memoir of a family encountering the American dream, self exile, and the fickle nature of humanity. I am reminded of a saying my father taught me: " there is good news and bad news. The good news is life is long. but the bad news is life is...long." So one must live each day for the day. These brothers tried their hardest to do just that and Edwidge does a beautiful job paying homage to the will of man.

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jules

jules rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

10/01/08

Read in July, 2008

Great book about a Haitian family and their experiences over about 50 years. Part of what makes it so great is that Danticat does a fantastic job of knowing exactly when to make the story emotional; she doesn't overdramatize (even though there would be ample opportunity for that), she doesn't really judge, she just gives the narratives and slips in the occasional line or two that make you take a deep breath.

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Kirby

Kirby rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

11/26/07

Read in November, 2007

Danticat hands you her story and walks away. Her writing style is stark here (my first time reading her); the facts are heavy, but she doesn't tug the reader one way or another or mandate sentiment. She relays her tale and then she is done. Damn. Very effective.

I thought most about "absence" on a few levels after finishing it. The literal absence of her parents and extended family at different periods of her life due to political strife and economic necessity. The unjustified abse...more

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Stacey

Stacey rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

09/17/08

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Stacey by: myself
recommends it for: anyone

Lovely, lyrical, tragic little read. It will make you want to storm I.C.E and beat up some bureaucrats.

She crafts a beautiful portrait of her Haitian family without being too sappy, or shoving Haiti's problems down your throat.

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Parastou

Parastou rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

10/06/08

very personal story, beautifully told. don't want to spoil the end, though its painful to read, shocking and a total indictment of ICE and our detention policies (there, I probably spoiled it anyway).

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Judy

Judy rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

07/19/08

Read in July, 2008

Almost ten years ago I read Edwidge Danticat's beautiful, lyrical novel "The Farming of Bones." That book and her other works focus on the turbulent Haitian experience, especially for women. This memoir, which won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of her childhood in Haiti and immigration to New York at age twelve, but instead of being centered around the female experience, it is really the story of the relationship of her father, who immigrated to NYC wi...more

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Michelle

Michelle rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

05/05/08

Read in May, 2008

I need to stop telling people "This is a book about a lady that grew up in Haiti with her uncle. Her uncle died, around the same time her father died, and she had a baby in between those times." (I'm not spoiling this for anybody; it says all of that stuff in the jacket of the book." I mean, that just sounds depressing, and overall, the book is not.

First of all, the book is really well written. Very simple language, but powerful. Characters, situations, feelings come across. ...more

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Lauren

Lauren rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

12/17/07

Read in December, 2007

Wow. If I thought I couldn't possibly lose even more respect for this president, his administration, his Homeland Security, and his policies, I was wrong.

This book is yet another reason why we should be very angry and should really work for change in whatever way we can.

This is a very intimate book. By the end, you feel as though you should be coming over with food for the family. I had always known bits and pieces about Haitian history from my years studying the French language, but no...more

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Courtney

Courtney rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

09/14/07

Read in December, 2007

This book is devastatingly good. Especially once you get to the second half of the book. I caught myself holding my breath as I read. I just could not believe what I was reading. Danticat tells the story of her family so beautifully. The descriptions of her two sets of parents (her aunt and uncle raised her for some time in Haiti, when her parents came to America to get settled. She eventually moved to America, but many of her formative years were with her aunt and uncle.) This story mostly focu...more

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Lisa

Lisa rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

02/19/08

Read in February, 2008

A deeply moving story of a Haitian woman and her family during the past three decades. Left behind at the age of 4 with her 2 year old brother, Edwidge Danticat spends 10 years in the care of her aunt and uncle in Haiti while her parents try to start a new live in New York. Eventually the family is united in N.Y., where Edwidge must start a new life with parents she barely knows and two new younger brothers. As she grows older she forms a close bond with her parents while maintaining her ties...more

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Kristin

Kristin rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

09/19/08

Memoir about a Haitian American whose father is dying. She also recounts the experiences of her and her family in Haiti. The book is interesting, but kind of slow.

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Carol

Carol rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

01/22/08

A very moving memoir of a Haitian family. Edwidge Danticat has two "fathers" who are very close to her heart: her father, Mira and his older brother Joseph who is a loving and charismatic pastor. It moves between Haiti and the United States. The end of the story paints an ugly picture of our Dept. of Homeland Security.

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Liz

Liz rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

10/01/08

Read in October, 2008

A story of love, immigration and injustice.
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to appreciate the dynamics of this story.

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Seven

Seven rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

06/06/08

recommends it for: Everyone

First and foremost I love this author: Edwidge Danticat. And this last book made me cry and realized that Haitian are the forgotten people and it very sad that we can do more to help them more. It’s a beautiful book of family, love, and what goes on in Haiti.

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HK rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

10/16/08

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: Everyone

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

“Brother, I’m Dying” is a family memoir. Carefully mapping the lives of her father, Mira and her uncle Joseph, Edwidge Danticat weaves a rich tapestry of her family’s beginning in Haiti, to her parents exodus, their reunion with her and her brother after many years, to her uncle’s ultimate exile from his country in the custody of US Immigration Services. Just like life, the memoir filled with flashbacks, afterthoughts and unanswered questions.

Danticat’s writing style is distinct...more “Brother, I’m Dying” is a family memoir. Carefully mapping the lives of her father, Mira and her uncle Joseph, Edwidge Danticat weaves a rich tapestry of her family’s beginning in Haiti, to her parents exodus, their reunion with her and her brother after many years, to her uncle’s ultimate exile from his country in the custody of US Immigration Services. Just like life, the memoir filled with flashbacks, afterthoughts and unanswered questions.

Danticat’s writing style is distinctive and unmistakably the same as in her other works such as “The Farming of Bones” and “Breath Eyes Memory”. With a disarming intimacy, every word seems golden, carefully selected to maintain a rare poetic quality due to Danticat’s superior linguistic skills. With English as a tertiary language, nothing is lost in translation, contributing to her unique voice. In all works by Danticat, there is a notion of yellow dust. A golden shimmer that engulfs you, yet does not cloud her vision nor sugarcoat it. It offers you a chance to become one with her characters, at time it makes the emotions raw and painful, the dust burns your eyes and your lungs. Danticat have come to define the state of being in which one can be an outside member. A lingering state of belonging from the outside and being on the outside of the culture that is essentially yours that many readers identify with. Including me.

Faced with her father’s death, Edwidge is reminded of the role her uncle has played in her life. Joseph and his wife cared for Edwidge and her brother while her parents left Haiti and to start a life for the family in New York and the historical circumstances and chances would shape her family’s life and outcome. At this time, Danticat learns that she is carrying her first child and like the cycle of life, there is a great contrast between the preparation for her father’s terminal care and her the preparation for her daughter’s arrival. As her father’s health deteriorated, her uncle made a final attempt to visit him but never made it. With a collected calm, Danticat manages to approach the story and unanswered questions that makes her boil. Demanding answers her father nor uncle was able to ask. Her uncle at the age of 81 died in custody of the US Immigration services, after a misunderstanding at the passport control. Denied any rights and not brought to appropriate medical attention, Danticat recounts for her uncle’s last hours unraveling the senseless injustice and heartbreak brought on her family and undoubtedly many others in “the county’s best interest”. Like the cycle of life, the memoir come to a close as Danticat herself remembers her father’s last days and the first of her daughter’s. One is left with a sense of knowing, wistful hope and much richer. ...less

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Rebecca

Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

08/20/08

Read in August, 2008

I found this totally engaging, emotionally rich, intimate, lovely, honest. I've had trouble getting into Danticat's fiction, but this was completely different. From the first sentence, scanned in line at the Mid-Manhattan Library, I was hooked, and pretty much didn't put it down until I finished it the next day.

I think one of the things that works here is the level tone--she's not making her parents and uncle into unrealistic mythical creatures or going off with hysterical or purple pros...more

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Frank

Frank rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

08/05/08

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: all

Finished listening to it on a 5 hour car trip yesterday and was very impressed. The first half is very good and the second half is even better. Her uncle's story is even more riveting and provocative than her father's and she tells it so very well.
This is a book that offers a different perspective about so many issues - immigration, exile, imperialism, democracy, exploitation of the poor, religion, race, health, death, birth and, most of all, love and family.
*******************************...more

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Keleigh

Keleigh rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

03/30/08

bookshelves: schooldaze

Read in February, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

It took me a while to figure out what this book was “about.” It wasn’t until the second chapter (”Brother, I’m Dying”) that I realized this was going to be a family history of sorts, focused specifically on Uncle Joseph and the father. At the end of chapter one, when Danticat tells us, “I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents…” I wondered what things, exactly, she was referring to. Was this going to plunge b...more

It took me a while to figure out what this book was “about.” It wasn’t until the second chapter (”Brother, I’m Dying”) that I realized this was going to be a family history of sorts, focused specifically on Uncle Joseph and the father. At the end of chapter one, when Danticat tells us, “I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents…” I wondered what things, exactly, she was referring to. Was this going to plunge back in time, follow all the broken threads to the beginning, sew them back together to arrive at the present moment, with her pregnancy and her father dying? Or were we going to hopscotch in time, in measured increments, interspersing the flashbacks with present updates and musings? She informs us that “This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.” To be honest, this disclosure was, for me, the least cohesive passage of the whole book. Once I was taken back to 1946, I felt wholly immersed in this family’s story, its brilliant and determined characters, and their struggle for cohesion. I realize that what I thought at first was the “present moment” (Edwidge learning she is pregnant, at the same time she learns the extent of her father’s illness) is actually the story’s point of entry, not the moment at which she is now writing. We loop around to this entry point on page 156, when Uncle Joseph comes to NY, Edwidge is in her third trimester, and her father is hospitalized for the first time. The last third or so of the book moves forward in time, carrying us to her uncle’s death, her daughter’s birth, and her father’s final days.

There were so many heartbreaking moments in this book, but the ones that wrought from me the deepest and most painful gasps came in these last “present-day” chapters. Uncle Joseph’s treatment at the airport, his time at Krome, the endless hoping against hope that someone would have some goddamn humanity…I was riveted, horrified, and amazed. Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own” of the writer’s mind “incandescent”–undisturbed by “alien emotions” like fear and hatred, not harassed or distracted by grievances. I bring this up only to point out how masterfully Danticat tells a story in which all manners of fear, hatred, and grievances are justified. And yet her telling of it is, in my opinion, “incandescent.” She gives us the facts, not without feeling, but without vendetta. She lets us in to her family, recounts their stories of selflessness, love and suffering, and offers them up Biblical in proportion, yet with the gentle and loving nuance of homage. In giving us her family history, she drew us close enough to her two “lost” characters–her father and uncle–to render any elaboration unnecessary when their deaths come. She allowed us as readers to develop our own bonds to these men, feel our own outrage and indignation at their mistreatment and suffering, our own joy at their transcendence and generosity, and, ultimately, our own mourning as they slip away.
...less

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Heidi

Heidi rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

09/22/08

bookshelves: audio, biography, historical, made-an-impression-on-me, nonfiction

Read in September, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Julia

Julia rated it:

(review of isbn 1400041155)

01/29/08

Read in January, 2008

Whenever an author of color publishes a book - especially when the author is from a country that has experienced war or poverty, etc - everyone wants to talk about her or his report of hardship and struggle (this is partly an issue of access - publishers don't want to publish "everyday life" books when they can publish a nonfiction book about some human rights atrocity across the border that US readers will happily eat up). The parts of Brother, I'm Dying that I most enjoyed were the ...more

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avg rating (all editions): 4.18 (514 ratings)
avg rating (this edition): 3.67 (3 ratings)
number of reviews: 161

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