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Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
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.
Rich 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.
Rich 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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 11, 2025
37 people are currently reading
4190 people want to read
About the author
Rich Benjamin
4 books70 followersI like to entertain, read, travel, golf, and eat.
I am a cultural anthropologist and the author of Searching for Whitopia. My writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Also, I've appeared as a commentator on MSNBC and CNN. I am grateful for the support that my work has received from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Ford Foundation, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
I am a cultural anthropologist and the author of Searching for Whitopia. My writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Also, I've appeared as a commentator on MSNBC and CNN. I am grateful for the support that my work has received from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Ford Foundation, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 30, 2025
I wish I liked this book more. There is a lot of good work in these chapters, but I had a hard time finding it in me to care more about the author and his story than a 3.5. I don't know why. Writing was good. I care deeply about LGBTQ+ people, being one myself. I am very interested in Haitian history. I am incensed by how Haiti has had to "pay back" France for 132 years in order to be an independent country untethered from slavery, which also ensured it remained crippled in poverty and created the conditions that led to the exile of this family and worse.
All the components of this story should've touched me more. And there were plenty of moments that it did. I think maybe the fact that Benjamin was working out his conflicted relationship with his mom through these pages were hard for me to read through, and that had more to do with me than it did with him - with me rubbing up against the conflicts with my own mom that I did not wish to revisit.
I recommend this book. I think I may try reading it again later when I'm in a better headspace. I'm sure I'd like it more then. There are definitely lots of beautiful and/or necessary moments throughout the book that I will carry with me, even though it peaks at a 3.5 for me tonight.
All the components of this story should've touched me more. And there were plenty of moments that it did. I think maybe the fact that Benjamin was working out his conflicted relationship with his mom through these pages were hard for me to read through, and that had more to do with me than it did with him - with me rubbing up against the conflicts with my own mom that I did not wish to revisit.
I recommend this book. I think I may try reading it again later when I'm in a better headspace. I'm sure I'd like it more then. There are definitely lots of beautiful and/or necessary moments throughout the book that I will carry with me, even though it peaks at a 3.5 for me tonight.
April 25, 2025
3.5, really.
Benjamin's story is one of generational trauma entwined in Haiti's history. Wikipedia describes him as a 'public intellectual,' but here he relates his personal journey. Benjamin's grandfather was a brilliant, charismatic labor leader in Haiti in the 1950s, whose brief tenure as president was ended by 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's coup. The family fled to New York, where their life descended into poverty. Benjamin struggled with his identity: an American with a Haitian mother and an African father, a gay man who came out at the height of the AIDS epidemic, he led a wild life as a young man. So the book is about him, but he also dives into his family's history, something that was never talked about, to understand the family's dysfunction.
His grandfather's and Haiti's history is tragic. Benjamin digs up damning evidence of US interference in Haiti's politics; the consequences are evident even today, another example of the harm caused by imperialism.
I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.
Benjamin's story is one of generational trauma entwined in Haiti's history. Wikipedia describes him as a 'public intellectual,' but here he relates his personal journey. Benjamin's grandfather was a brilliant, charismatic labor leader in Haiti in the 1950s, whose brief tenure as president was ended by 'Papa Doc' Duvalier's coup. The family fled to New York, where their life descended into poverty. Benjamin struggled with his identity: an American with a Haitian mother and an African father, a gay man who came out at the height of the AIDS epidemic, he led a wild life as a young man. So the book is about him, but he also dives into his family's history, something that was never talked about, to understand the family's dysfunction.
His grandfather's and Haiti's history is tragic. Benjamin digs up damning evidence of US interference in Haiti's politics; the consequences are evident even today, another example of the harm caused by imperialism.
I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.
March 1, 2025
Enduring and moving historical nonfiction of one family's story through three generations and how imperialism and its trauma knows no borders and bounds. Learned about Haiti's past through the lives of fascinating individuals.
April 16, 2025
Good.
This is the author's memoir but as he stated in the end of the book, it is his love letter to his mother. He had felt abandoned as a child and not knowing his family's history until he did his research which resulted in this book.
The book is divided into 3 sections: 1) his grandfather's story, 2) his mother's story, and 3) his story.
His grandfather was Daniel Fignolé who became President of Haiti in 1957 but his presidency only lasted for 3 weeks thanks to a coup sponsored by the CIA. He and his wife were wisked off to NYC. His children, including the author's mother, were kidnapped by the Haitian military and kept in the Dessalines Military Barracks in Haiti. They were finally released and flown to NYC to join their parents.
The author's mother, Danielle, was the oldest of the children. While held captive by the Haitian military, the girls were raped. Danielle never talked about her experiences. She did live a fulfilling life. She married a Yale educated economist and lived in his home country of Guinea for a few years where she worked with the UN helping children. However, she left her children in the US with her mother raising them while she and her husband were in Guinea.
The author's story included his trials and tribulations as a young, gay, black man in NYC during the HIV and drug epidemic in NYC.
This is a family story of survival. How each member of the family succumbed to their tragedy is different. What is common is that no one talked of their experience. The author had to look at historical documents to discover his family's details.
Good memoir.
This is the author's memoir but as he stated in the end of the book, it is his love letter to his mother. He had felt abandoned as a child and not knowing his family's history until he did his research which resulted in this book.
The book is divided into 3 sections: 1) his grandfather's story, 2) his mother's story, and 3) his story.
His grandfather was Daniel Fignolé who became President of Haiti in 1957 but his presidency only lasted for 3 weeks thanks to a coup sponsored by the CIA. He and his wife were wisked off to NYC. His children, including the author's mother, were kidnapped by the Haitian military and kept in the Dessalines Military Barracks in Haiti. They were finally released and flown to NYC to join their parents.
The author's mother, Danielle, was the oldest of the children. While held captive by the Haitian military, the girls were raped. Danielle never talked about her experiences. She did live a fulfilling life. She married a Yale educated economist and lived in his home country of Guinea for a few years where she worked with the UN helping children. However, she left her children in the US with her mother raising them while she and her husband were in Guinea.
The author's story included his trials and tribulations as a young, gay, black man in NYC during the HIV and drug epidemic in NYC.
This is a family story of survival. How each member of the family succumbed to their tragedy is different. What is common is that no one talked of their experience. The author had to look at historical documents to discover his family's details.
Good memoir.
September 21, 2025
The story of a family can be told in fragments, in whispers, in silences that echo louder than speech. Talk to Me is that kind of telling: a grandson’s excavation of a coup, a mother’s guarded heart, and a son’s search for voice. What Rich Benjamin achieves here is not just a memoir, nor only a political history, but a weaving of the two into a single garment—shot through with threads of exile, illness, queerness, and resilience.
From the first pages, the reader enters the trembling space of 1957 Haiti. There, Daniel Fignolé—Benjamin’s grandfather—rose from labor agitation to the presidency, hailed by the Haitian masses as their first true champion. His tenure lasted only weeks before he was kidnapped and expelled in a coup supported by the Eisenhower administration. This moment becomes the primal wound, reverberating through decades and generations. Danielle, Fignolé’s daughter and Benjamin’s mother, learned silence in those days of exile: silence as shield, silence as survival. It is that silence that Benjamin, writing decades later, must confront and unravel.
The heart of this book beats in the mother–son relationship. Danielle appears as formidable and fragile at once: tailored suits, erect posture, unyielding discipline, yet sleepless nights wracked by nightmares of violence and flight. She raised her son in Washington, D.C., amid civil rights activism and bureaucratic labor, never learning to drive, dragging him on Metro and bus commutes to hospitals for his blood disease. He remembers her exhaustion, her slumped shoulders, her pinched eyes, but more than that he remembers her refusals: the times she would not pick him up when he asked to see the stars. Her mantra—“When you’ve been to hell and back, nothing can ever destroy you”—served both as armor and scar.
Benjamin writes these scenes with piercing tenderness, never indulging sentimentality. He shows how silence worked like a second language in their family, speaking what could not be spoken. Bus rides filled with hush carried as much weight as her rare confidences. Letters replaced birthday celebrations. Their intimacy was built on what was left unsaid.
What keeps the memoir alive is its refusal to stay only in the private sphere. Benjamin interlaces his mother’s stoicism with the longer history of American imperialism, Haitian politics, and the diasporic experience. He demonstrates how the coup of 1957 was not just a Haitian story but an American one, tied to Cold War paranoia, the shadow of Cuba, the hostility of Washington toward populist experiments in the Caribbean. In this sense, the book insists that every family’s trauma is also a geopolitical event, that the silence in a Brooklyn apartment is inseparable from cables in the State Department archive.
The writing bears the trace of that archival work. At times the book reads like a dossier, full of cables and testimonies; at other times it opens into lyrical remembrance, the rhythms of childhood illness, the rituals of reading tabloids in shame and novels in hope. Benjamin’s style echoes the fragmentation he describes: one paragraph turns on Rock Hudson and the AIDS crisis, the next on Haitian sugar strikes, the next on a birthday letter from Danielle praising her son’s wit. This shifting between the monumental and the mundane reflects the very texture of his family’s life.
Benjamin lingers on his own adolescence in suburban Maryland, where Churchill High School pressed him into the role of token. His peers rummaged in his hair, mocked its thickness, or forced him into classroom performances of Blackness during discussions of emancipation and Othello. At home, silence and neglect left birthdays unmarked. In the wider culture, tabloids screamed about AIDS as the “gay disease.” He absorbed shame through these rituals of self-hate, hiding in the family den with National Enquirer spreads, even as he nurtured escape through books like Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote. If tabloids taught him self-loathing, Capote taught him possibility—eccentricity transmuted into brilliance, queerness into celebrity.
The book’s structure loops between past and present, adolescence and adulthood, Haiti and America. The earthquake of 2010 becomes a turning point: Benjamin sees the National Palace collapsed, the very building his grandfather once inhabited as president. The rubble confronts him like a ghost, demanding witness. Despite Danielle’s pleas, he travels to Haiti, braving cholera and instability to search archives and speak with elders who remembered Fignolé. There, amidst ruin, he discovers both the memory of his grandfather’s promise and the bitterness of his fall. For the first time, he hears in living voices what his mother never spoke.
The memoir does not shrink from pain. One of its most searing chapters recounts Benjamin’s arrest in New York City, when police beat him, ignored his medical pleas, and shackled him to a hospital gurney. His sickle cell crisis was dismissed as invention, echoing a broader pattern where Black deaths in custody are attributed to the disease to excuse brutality. He places his ordeal in this context, citing records of dozens of such cases across decades. Here the personal merges with the systemic; the body becomes a battlefield for state violence.
And yet, Talk to Me is not only about wounding. It is also about survival, the ways love and silence can coexist. Danielle, for all her volatility and withholding, raised a son who could write this book. She wrote him letters, voluminous and affectionate, even as they skirted the deepest wounds. She laughed at Chaplin films, even as she cried out in nightmares at night. She taught him resilience, even if through severity. Her silence was not absence but a form of care—flawed, fractured, but real.
The final pages return to intimacy. Benjamin recalls sharing paella and laughter with his mother, only to hear her sobbing in her sleep hours later. He stood at her door, paralyzed, unable to comfort her. That paralysis—wanting to bridge the gap but fearing the flood it would unleash—summarizes their relationship. The memoir itself becomes his act of comfort, the belated hand extended.
Stylistically, the prose is braided, looping back on itself, mirroring memory’s nonlinearity. Benjamin moves with ease from personal to political, from the letters of his mother to the cables of the State Department, from Haitian funerals to American classrooms. The timbre is reflective, unsparing, pained but also tender. He does not flinch from critique—of his mother, of America, of himself—but he writes always with empathy.
The book’s great strength lies in its willingness to dwell in contradiction: Danielle as both resilient and withholding, silence as both protective and corrosive, exile as both survival and estrangement. The weakness, perhaps, lies in its occasional repetition, the circling back on themes without always pressing them forward. Some readers may feel the weight of this patterning, the echo of silence within the prose itself. Yet even this flaw feels integral to the subject: the book enacts the difficulty of breaking silence even as it attempts to do so.
In the end, Talk to Me is about inheritance—not only of history and politics but of habits of speech and silence. Benjamin inherits his grandfather’s populist promise, his mother’s stoic resilience, and their shared reticence. He also inherits illness, queerness, and the scars of America’s racial order. What he adds is his voice. By writing this book, he breaks the cycle, giving words to what his family could not.
The essence of my reception of the book is 81 out of 100.
From the first pages, the reader enters the trembling space of 1957 Haiti. There, Daniel Fignolé—Benjamin’s grandfather—rose from labor agitation to the presidency, hailed by the Haitian masses as their first true champion. His tenure lasted only weeks before he was kidnapped and expelled in a coup supported by the Eisenhower administration. This moment becomes the primal wound, reverberating through decades and generations. Danielle, Fignolé’s daughter and Benjamin’s mother, learned silence in those days of exile: silence as shield, silence as survival. It is that silence that Benjamin, writing decades later, must confront and unravel.
The heart of this book beats in the mother–son relationship. Danielle appears as formidable and fragile at once: tailored suits, erect posture, unyielding discipline, yet sleepless nights wracked by nightmares of violence and flight. She raised her son in Washington, D.C., amid civil rights activism and bureaucratic labor, never learning to drive, dragging him on Metro and bus commutes to hospitals for his blood disease. He remembers her exhaustion, her slumped shoulders, her pinched eyes, but more than that he remembers her refusals: the times she would not pick him up when he asked to see the stars. Her mantra—“When you’ve been to hell and back, nothing can ever destroy you”—served both as armor and scar.
Benjamin writes these scenes with piercing tenderness, never indulging sentimentality. He shows how silence worked like a second language in their family, speaking what could not be spoken. Bus rides filled with hush carried as much weight as her rare confidences. Letters replaced birthday celebrations. Their intimacy was built on what was left unsaid.
What keeps the memoir alive is its refusal to stay only in the private sphere. Benjamin interlaces his mother’s stoicism with the longer history of American imperialism, Haitian politics, and the diasporic experience. He demonstrates how the coup of 1957 was not just a Haitian story but an American one, tied to Cold War paranoia, the shadow of Cuba, the hostility of Washington toward populist experiments in the Caribbean. In this sense, the book insists that every family’s trauma is also a geopolitical event, that the silence in a Brooklyn apartment is inseparable from cables in the State Department archive.
The writing bears the trace of that archival work. At times the book reads like a dossier, full of cables and testimonies; at other times it opens into lyrical remembrance, the rhythms of childhood illness, the rituals of reading tabloids in shame and novels in hope. Benjamin’s style echoes the fragmentation he describes: one paragraph turns on Rock Hudson and the AIDS crisis, the next on Haitian sugar strikes, the next on a birthday letter from Danielle praising her son’s wit. This shifting between the monumental and the mundane reflects the very texture of his family’s life.
Benjamin lingers on his own adolescence in suburban Maryland, where Churchill High School pressed him into the role of token. His peers rummaged in his hair, mocked its thickness, or forced him into classroom performances of Blackness during discussions of emancipation and Othello. At home, silence and neglect left birthdays unmarked. In the wider culture, tabloids screamed about AIDS as the “gay disease.” He absorbed shame through these rituals of self-hate, hiding in the family den with National Enquirer spreads, even as he nurtured escape through books like Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote. If tabloids taught him self-loathing, Capote taught him possibility—eccentricity transmuted into brilliance, queerness into celebrity.
The book’s structure loops between past and present, adolescence and adulthood, Haiti and America. The earthquake of 2010 becomes a turning point: Benjamin sees the National Palace collapsed, the very building his grandfather once inhabited as president. The rubble confronts him like a ghost, demanding witness. Despite Danielle’s pleas, he travels to Haiti, braving cholera and instability to search archives and speak with elders who remembered Fignolé. There, amidst ruin, he discovers both the memory of his grandfather’s promise and the bitterness of his fall. For the first time, he hears in living voices what his mother never spoke.
The memoir does not shrink from pain. One of its most searing chapters recounts Benjamin’s arrest in New York City, when police beat him, ignored his medical pleas, and shackled him to a hospital gurney. His sickle cell crisis was dismissed as invention, echoing a broader pattern where Black deaths in custody are attributed to the disease to excuse brutality. He places his ordeal in this context, citing records of dozens of such cases across decades. Here the personal merges with the systemic; the body becomes a battlefield for state violence.
And yet, Talk to Me is not only about wounding. It is also about survival, the ways love and silence can coexist. Danielle, for all her volatility and withholding, raised a son who could write this book. She wrote him letters, voluminous and affectionate, even as they skirted the deepest wounds. She laughed at Chaplin films, even as she cried out in nightmares at night. She taught him resilience, even if through severity. Her silence was not absence but a form of care—flawed, fractured, but real.
The final pages return to intimacy. Benjamin recalls sharing paella and laughter with his mother, only to hear her sobbing in her sleep hours later. He stood at her door, paralyzed, unable to comfort her. That paralysis—wanting to bridge the gap but fearing the flood it would unleash—summarizes their relationship. The memoir itself becomes his act of comfort, the belated hand extended.
Stylistically, the prose is braided, looping back on itself, mirroring memory’s nonlinearity. Benjamin moves with ease from personal to political, from the letters of his mother to the cables of the State Department, from Haitian funerals to American classrooms. The timbre is reflective, unsparing, pained but also tender. He does not flinch from critique—of his mother, of America, of himself—but he writes always with empathy.
The book’s great strength lies in its willingness to dwell in contradiction: Danielle as both resilient and withholding, silence as both protective and corrosive, exile as both survival and estrangement. The weakness, perhaps, lies in its occasional repetition, the circling back on themes without always pressing them forward. Some readers may feel the weight of this patterning, the echo of silence within the prose itself. Yet even this flaw feels integral to the subject: the book enacts the difficulty of breaking silence even as it attempts to do so.
In the end, Talk to Me is about inheritance—not only of history and politics but of habits of speech and silence. Benjamin inherits his grandfather’s populist promise, his mother’s stoic resilience, and their shared reticence. He also inherits illness, queerness, and the scars of America’s racial order. What he adds is his voice. By writing this book, he breaks the cycle, giving words to what his family could not.
The essence of my reception of the book is 81 out of 100.
May 1, 2025
The title grabbed me and I was intrigued by the story: the author's grandfather was once the president of Haiti, but his mother, Danielle Fignolé, and her siblings were all kidnapped and forcibly removed to New York. Benjamin had no clue of this growing up, but found his mother distant, erratic, and someone who was less and less connected to him as time went on. So this book pieces together the story of his family.
The book is essentially in three parts: his grandfather's story, then his mother's and then his own. From the rise of his grandfather to the coup. His mother and her siblings were first kidnapped to Haiti, where the girls were raped. And while his mother would go on to marry and have children, etc. it is obvious the generational trauma carried down to her own children, with her son Benjamin would later navigate New York at the height of AIDS and drugs, etc.
It's an interesting story and certainly a history that is not going to be taught in the US, at least not unless you're a specialist or expert of sorts. But all the same I couldn't really connect with the text. Like others said, it does feel like Benjamin is trying to work though his relationship with his mother in the pages and it does get in the way of the history (while of course, this was his book and his family's story and he had the right to tell it as he wanted, etc.).
Definitely a read for someone who is interested in the history of Haiti, certain aspects of US history that don't get a lot of coverage here, etc. If you don't know much about Haiti or are just a casual reader, this might be skippable.
Borrowed from the library and that was best for me. Wouldn't surprise me to see this on a class syllabus on Haiti, etc., although you can certainly read it without a class.
The book is essentially in three parts: his grandfather's story, then his mother's and then his own. From the rise of his grandfather to the coup. His mother and her siblings were first kidnapped to Haiti, where the girls were raped. And while his mother would go on to marry and have children, etc. it is obvious the generational trauma carried down to her own children, with her son Benjamin would later navigate New York at the height of AIDS and drugs, etc.
It's an interesting story and certainly a history that is not going to be taught in the US, at least not unless you're a specialist or expert of sorts. But all the same I couldn't really connect with the text. Like others said, it does feel like Benjamin is trying to work though his relationship with his mother in the pages and it does get in the way of the history (while of course, this was his book and his family's story and he had the right to tell it as he wanted, etc.).
Definitely a read for someone who is interested in the history of Haiti, certain aspects of US history that don't get a lot of coverage here, etc. If you don't know much about Haiti or are just a casual reader, this might be skippable.
Borrowed from the library and that was best for me. Wouldn't surprise me to see this on a class syllabus on Haiti, etc., although you can certainly read it without a class.
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June 10, 2025Rich Benjamin provides an honest and at times devastating look at his own family but clearly out of love and a desire to know his mother. At the same time, it’s a delicate balance as he points out: “How much I was gambling the perverse comforts of our present relationship in hopes of building a bond that might or might not draw us closer?”And there are so many other quotes that stood out to me when he really dives into this gap that keeps us from knowing people who are really close to us, whether it’s the way they were raised, trauma, or some other force that acts as a wall even against really close loved ones. And while it’s deeply personal, Benjamin connects it to the wider history of Haiti as a country. A lot of research went into his recounting the history and politics, he shows the evidence of the US involvement—it’s not just a family myth, it’s a very real thing and as he states had devastating fallout that wasn’t even considered or simply disregarded. and he also makes it clear that this isn’t just a single issue or an isolated event, it’s still relevant today.
August 15, 2025
Pros :: An amazing story of his grandfather, Daniel Fignole, who was President of Haiti for 19 days before a President Eisenhower and the CIA coup, with Francois Duvalier who took over the country. It recounted his life growing up, his political activism and physical and mental aloofness and abuse he caused his wife and children. This personal history also touched on his mother, the eldest child of Daniele and Carmen's Danielle, and, the author's own life. All the strings attach to Daniel Fignole, his wife Carmen, their eight children and their flee from Haiti and then exile in New York. Rich Benjamin's father, Edouard Benjamin, was an intellectual from Guinea who also had to escape Ethiopia to the US once Guinea was taken over by a dictator.
Cons :: Nothing
Cover art :: 5 out of 5
Cons :: Nothing
Cover art :: 5 out of 5
February 14, 2025
An amazing, moving book about the long legacy of imperialism told through one family from Haiti.
March 19, 2025
Tough, poignant story of the costs of colonialism, patriarchy, racism and domestic urban poverty all told through the lens of one remarkable family. Couldn’t put it down.
April 22, 2025
This book is powerful and surprising in so many ways.
April 25, 2025
I think this was a really interesting take on a family’s tussle with history. It was so good!
May 25, 2025
Memoir of three generations of family history of the turmoil of Haiti and how devastating it turned out.
June 26, 2025
There was some heavy fictionalization without transparency in the first third or so of this book and that’s the only reason I’m not giving this five stars.
July 18, 2025
This absolutely one of the best books I have ever read.
December 21, 2025
Amazing book.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews