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Brother, I'm Dying |  | Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Seller: thriftit
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 221948
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 1400041155
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400041152
ASIN: 1400041155
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart—her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who “knew all the verses for love.”
And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she’s ever known.
Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I’m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by an angry mob, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge’s firstborn, who will bear his name—and the family’s stories, both joyous and tragic—into the next generation.
Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family—of two men’s lives and deaths, and of a daughter’s great love for them both.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 This memoir has much to say to readers of any age about coming of age, home, immigration and family October 5, 2009
American Immigration Council's Community Education Center (Washington, DC)
Uncle Joseph, a pastor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, became a "second father" to Edwidge Danticat and her younger brother, Bob, when they were placed in his care after their parents immigrated to America in search of a better life. As the youngsters become part of their uncle's extended family and church community, they develop a deep attachment to him and his wife, their Tante Denise. After eight years, when they are finally reunited with their parents and two younger brothers in New York City, they experience a flood of mixed emotions as they try to reestablish the family. Interwoven into this story of separation and reunion is the terrifying story of the dangerous political situation in Haiti which in 2004 forces Uncle Joseph, then 81 years old, to seek safety with his brother's family in the United States. The horrifying events that occurred when he arrived in Miami and asked for asylum were reported in the news around the world. Although he had a valid passport and visa, Uncle Joseph was detained by US Customs and then transferred to the Krome detention center by the Department of Homeland Security. While at Krome he became ill and due to lack of proper medical attention and he died several days later. Soon after her uncle's death Edwidge's father succumbs to a fatal illness just after her child, named for her father, is born.
Beautifully written and constructed, this memoir has much to say to readers of any age about coming of age, home, and family, as well as offering the opportunity for classroom discussion and exploration of current American immigration policy. After the publication of Brother I'm Dying, the New York Times Review of Books cited Edwidge Danticat as one of the best young American writers of 2007.
 Well crafted and worthwhile but hard to engage June 6, 2009
A. M. Guest
Stories of Haiti and its people are important but marginalized in most of the US. This book tells one such story in a spare and elegant way through the experience of Edwidge Danticat's family. The family, and by implication Haiti itself, is portrayed as a complex mixture of vibrancy, bad luck, love, and victimization. The US stirs that mixture in both big and small ways--through government policies and human relationships. The book ultimately provides a worthwhile representation of how immigrant families can love the opportunities of the US--the father as a cab driver able to establish his children for thriving lives as writers and financiers--while resenting the costs--the petty bigotry of immigration officials inured to an uncle's genuine desperation. And of how such a family can love Haiti--the uncle as a voiceless preacher tending to a loving flock--while fleeing the desperation--the mobs of para-military youth that use violence as a pathetic grasp at small feelings of power.
But while the book was worth reading, and while I grew to admire the crafting of the writing over its course, I was also a bit disappointed. Perhaps part of my disappointment may be because I have heard and read much acclaim for Danticat's writing and for this book in particular. I may have expected too much. But the first third of the book read as slow and self-indulgent. Though the family's story is ultimately quite engaging, the reader is not given an opportunity to understand why we should care as much as the narrator. Further, though Danticat herself tries to stay out of the way of the story of her father and uncle, that effort ends up feeling a bit hollow. By only inserting bits about her own role as dutiful, loving, and conflicted, the author reads as more naive than the sophistication of her prose suggests.
Three stories, two countries, interwoven May 15, 2009
M. Feldman (Bowdoin, Maine, USA)
This is a fine memoir, well worth reading. Other reviews have summarized the story of the two brothers, so I will simply add that because Danticat is a novelist, she has a superior eye for detail. Thus, she is able to convey, clearly and unsentimentally, a sense of what life is like in Haiti: the long and difficult process of getting medical care for her uncle Joseph's throat cancer, the menace of unpredictable political violence, the simple meal of sweet coffee and dimpled bread a poor woman offers Joseph when he seeks shelter in her home. Using the reports available to her, Danticat also powerfully recreates the disturbing scene when Joseph becomes ill in the office of the U.S. Customs officials who are holding him in Miami. Just as compelling is her depiction of a much smaller moment, when she brings her dying father, who can eat little, a bowl of rice perfectly cooked by his wife.
universal themes, real emotion March 20, 2009
Christine Dilacqua (San Jose, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read an excerpt of this in The New Yorker before the book was published. The excerpt intrigued me for being so well written and so full of feeling. I remembered that excerpt when I heard an interview with the author on Fresh Air and read the book in late 2007. This is a beautifully written memoir, full of details of daily life and feelings exchanged between family members. The author's story of her uncle's detainment by US immigration is heartbreaking. I think of this whenever I hear of another unfortunate person who dies while in custody and lacking medical care.
An interesting memoir about family relations, immigration and Haiti March 9, 2009
Tanya Griffin (Wilkes-Barre)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book was a wonderfully written story about family relations. It did drag a bit in a few spots and I would have liked to hear more about Haiti overall. Not just the violence and the US and UN activities in the country. The ending was so shocking I did not believe it and found myself embarrassed at the treatment of the individual by our governments policies (I don't want to give it away) so I can't elaborate. Truely a tragedy that one would not wish upon their worst enemy.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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