Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
Harrowing ... Benjamin’s writing can be clunky, as when he resorts to novelistic imaginings of events in the distant past. His flights of lyricism tend to crash and burn, and for all the research that he describes in a self-congratulatory author’s note, Talk to Me is shot through with errors ... Despite the errors of history and geography, the goofy novelizations, the off-key lyric arias, Talk to Me is, ultimately, a moving and valuable book. Benjamin is dogged in pursuing the historical understanding that might help him unravel his family’s psychic anguish.
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Benjamin knits together a winding history of the island’s geopolitical and domestic turbulence with an accounting of his family’s story ... Makes the case that understanding Haiti’s place in the New World might lead to a fuller accounting of the entire hemisphere’s history—including our own.
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Benjamin’s book succeeds as both a political history of twentieth-century Haiti and a compelling family saga.
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