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78th out of 198 books
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Brother, I'm Dying (Vintage Contemporaries)
From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far...more
Paperback, 288 pages
Published
September 9th 2008
by Vintage
(first published January 1st 2007)
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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 unjustif...more
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 unjustif...more
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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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
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 ...more
First of all, the book is really well written. Very simple language, but powerful. Characters, situations, feelings come ...more
I am not Haitian. But you will know me better if you read this, because the author has had such an influence on my passions and what I have studied. This book is biographical. I've read and own the 4 other major books written by Edwidge Danticat, and they are my most (and possibly only) lent books. If you ever wondered why I wrote so much about Haiti in college, take a read.
I don't know if I should recommend this book out of order from the other ones, or possibly if this should b...more
I don't know if I should recommend this book out of order from the other ones, or possibly if this should b...more
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 ...more
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 ...more
After reading Kidder’s Mountain Beyond Mountain about Dr. Farmer, Brother I’m Dying was an eloquent and welcomed portrait of the life of one Haitian family. This book adds a third dimension to the sketch of Haiti we get from Farmer through Kidder. Danticat is no less than graceful in painting the full picture of living, loving and dying in her family all against the backdrop of a constantly flailing Haiti. This is a great book for college classrooms, book clubs, or well – anyone who loves their ...more
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
I learned so much about the political turmoil in Haiti through this book but the family story is what is just so compelling!! Still - the ending was so unbelievably sad that the last 30 pages were difficult to read as the tears running down my face kept smearing the words.
A powerful story told with restraint, but while it was interesting from a cultural/political point of view, I wasn't as wowed by the writing as I expected from all the accolades.
Danticat's intimate prose makes you feel like you're part of her family whose story this memoir narrates. Not only is it heartbreaking and beautiful; it's also a terrifying validation of postcolonial theorists' fears about globalization. It's difficult to maintain the "proud to be an american" mindset when, narratively speaking, the united states chooses to be the antagonist of so many stories like this one. Read Danticat for her absolutely beautiful writing... but also read her for...more
Edwidge Danticat's memoir about her father and his brother, with whom she lived for a large chunk of her childhood, is a sad and upsetting story. Both men were significant figures in her life, and in this book she pays homage to them. Her father and mother left her and her brother in Haiti while they established themselves in New York. During that time, she lived with her uncle, a pastor and political activist, in Port-au-Prince. Much later, shortly after Danticat married and moved to Miami,...more
Brother I am Dying, by Edwidge Danticat. A. Narrated by Robin Miles. Produced by recorded Books and downloaded from audible.com.
Edwidge and her brother were left with their uncle Joseph, a pastor in Haiti, while her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York to find a better life. Several years later, her parents, who had had two more children in the meantime, came back to Haiti to get the children. This is Edwidge’s story about the always continuing unrest in Haiti, and her move ...more
Edwidge and her brother were left with their uncle Joseph, a pastor in Haiti, while her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York to find a better life. Several years later, her parents, who had had two more children in the meantime, came back to Haiti to get the children. This is Edwidge’s story about the always continuing unrest in Haiti, and her move ...more
I read this book while sitting up half the night on duty at a homeless shelter. It was a good setting in which to read the book, particularly the second half. I was in the position, albeit a volunteer one, of the guards in the Krome detention center featured in the book, the one of authority and keeping order and following regulations. Institutions are by their nature, I think, regulatory—the need for rules, for all to be treated the same—is high. And yet one must always look for ways to hum...more
I'm so glad Danticat is getting more attention these days. She's not just a wonderful Haitian writer, she's a wonderful writer, period. Nevertheless, it's also important to read about Haiti and the Haitian experience in something other than the newspaper, to recognize its artists and culture. This is a beautifully crafted family memoir centered on the lives of Danticat's two father figures, her real father whom she was separated from for many years as a child while they tried to relocate the fam...more
This was a powerful book. I can't say I knew much about Haiti before I read this book. I mean, I knew it was an incredibly poor country that shared Hispanola with the Dominican Republic. I knew that it got hit by a devestating earthquake earlier this year and that more recently there had been a cholera outbreak. I aborbed, via new coverage, that the capital was Port-au-Prince (just had to look up the spelling). Oh, I'd also heard at some point that milk cost almost $10 a gallon there, but I...more
The book jacket describes this as “an astonishing true-life epic”, and that’s true. But it also feels endearingly small and personal, straight from the heart of the child and young woman the author was. It’s not, as I expected, mostly an indictment of US immigration employees questionably detaining – essentially jailing-- a sick, elderly Haitian man – though it certainly lays out what was probably stupidity and bias accompanying.
It’s more the story of what happened after the au...more
It’s more the story of what happened after the au...more
Completed: 10/09
Snapshot: In this memoir, Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat tells of the lives and deaths of her father and his brother, who raised her in Haiti until she was 12 years old. She narrates her fond memories of these men, but this is no sentimental family story: necessarily she tells also of the horrible political events, the trying illnesses, and the personal regret that fill these men’s lives as one settles in the United States and the other stays behind in Ha...more
Snapshot: In this memoir, Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat tells of the lives and deaths of her father and his brother, who raised her in Haiti until she was 12 years old. She narrates her fond memories of these men, but this is no sentimental family story: necessarily she tells also of the horrible political events, the trying illnesses, and the personal regret that fill these men’s lives as one settles in the United States and the other stays behind in Ha...more
I loved this book, which is the story of the author and her family in Haiti and in the US. It is probably pointless to go into the details. Her father left for the US to escape Haiti, while his brother remained. The ending is very sad. And shameful. I hope you'll read it. Tonight I watched CNN long enough to see that an effort to distribute high-protein biscuits to the earthquake survivors in Haiti ended with the UN truck and volunteers being forced to abandon a huge group of citizens after som...more
Recommendation from Jezebel:
The beginning of this book made me tear up on the subway, and the ending made me shiver. Danticat writes about her childhood separation from her parents — they moved to the United States while she and her brother stayed in Haiti — their eventual reunion, her father's illness and death, and her uncle's ill-fated attempt to gain asylum in America with language whose matter-of-factness and precision become a perfect conduit for love, fear, regret, and outrage. It's...more
The beginning of this book made me tear up on the subway, and the ending made me shiver. Danticat writes about her childhood separation from her parents — they moved to the United States while she and her brother stayed in Haiti — their eventual reunion, her father's illness and death, and her uncle's ill-fated attempt to gain asylum in America with language whose matter-of-factness and precision become a perfect conduit for love, fear, regret, and outrage. It's...more
It’s not often that I don’t finish a book. But I put this one down one day and never got back to it. I wanted to like it. I’ve read some of Edwidge Danticat’s fiction and loved her lyrical language and her sense of place. But her family history, Brother, I’m Dying, just didn’t keep my interest, and certainly did not show the same beautiful language of her other books. But maybe you should decide for yourself. It was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
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Listening to this excellent book on CD from the library. Savoring every moment of it. It is written with such heart. Edwidge Danticat recounts her childhood in Haiti, where she and her brother lived for 8 years, staying with her uncle Joseph and his wife Denise, while their parents settled in America, had 2 more children, and finally got the right to bring their older children to the U.S.
Eight years is a long time, especially in a child's life. Joseph and Denise, were surrogate parent...more
Eight years is a long time, especially in a child's life. Joseph and Denise, were surrogate parent...more
Edwidge Danticat's father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on future generations, Danticat's powerful family memoir explores how the private and the political, the past and the present, intersect. The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider stor
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Brilliant, sad, and profoundly revealing of the depth of feeling within a family and the force that politics and economics bear on the course of that family's life. The thoughtfulness, grace, and warm yet elegant writing that inform Danticat's fiction are in full play here. You won't forget the two main characters—Danticat's father and uncle—or the tumultuous upheaval that roils Haiti during the period she depicts. More proof that Danticat's one of the brightest literary voices today.
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This is a moving paean to Danticat's two fathers - one, her biological father in New York and the other his brother who raised her for eight years in Haiti. One might expect this memoir to center on the upheavals in the author's own life - both personal and political - but instead, it's the brothers' lives we come to know best - as seen through the eyes of their shared daughter, who also becomes a mother during the course of the story.
Ultimately, this is a book about the strength, t...more
Ultimately, this is a book about the strength, t...more
What is a memoir supposed to accomplish? I only ask because I'm not sure what the goal of this one was. I imagine this would be interesting to people who were already devoted to Danticat as a person or an author. But I haven't read any of her other stuff. While there are a few notable things in her story (immigrant parents and a childhood in Haiti separated from them for many years, for example), I don't feel like she revealed much. Her thoughts about and reactions to what happens to her seem en...more
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.
I have always loved Edwidge Danticat and this book cemented that affection. I endured teasing from my husband and our companions on a cabin getaway for reading such a "depressing!" book on vacation. Eh. I gravitate towards the darker side sometimes in a search for the light within and found such light in this book. There are unspeakable tragedies amongst Danticat's Haitian family, but the strongest current in this book for me was the devoted love she had for her uncle. This man acted a...more
An incredibly powerful tribute to the author's father and uncle, who died within a short span of time. She tells their stories in a mix of flashbacks & family stories, setting them against the turbulent recent history of Haiti.
Her uncle sounds like a truly inspiring man, as reflected in the way he took in friends & relatives and went to great efforts to make the world around him a better place. The section of the book describing his death was infuriating and heartbreaking. Mob vio...more
Her uncle sounds like a truly inspiring man, as reflected in the way he took in friends & relatives and went to great efforts to make the world around him a better place. The section of the book describing his death was infuriating and heartbreaking. Mob vio...more
This book was an eye-opener for me and should be required reading by anyone who doesn't realize what went on in Haiti circa 2004 just recent years ago. An engrossing read that's something of a page-turner. Her father emigrated to Brooklyn and her Uncle stayed behind and was caught up in the turmoil and bloodshed. You have to question why the U.S. made detainees wear blue suits like prison uniforms, and why her Uncle wasn't given the life-saving medication that he took back home in Haiti. Thi...more
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| Danticat to speak about the book | 1 | 26 | Sep 21, 2007 04:10pm |
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beac...more
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“It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
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