Talk to Me

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.“A brilliant, absorbing book…I couldn’t stop reading.” —Salman Rushdie, author of KnifeRich 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 spo