
Talk to Me
Lessons from a Family Forged by History
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Narrated by:
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Rich Benjamin
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By:
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Rich Benjamin
About this listen
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 Knife
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.
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Critic reviews
A Most Anticipated Book from Oprah Daily, Foreign Policy, Literary Hub, Publishers Weekly, and Traci Thomas on SheReads
“[Benjamin’s] training as a cultural anthropologist shines through in his extensive research, and he renders history in lush, expressive detail… The three main characters—grandfather, mother, and Benjamin himself—all try to reconcile their desire for a better world with a desire for their family’s safety. This struggle manifests differently for each of them, and the resulting tension binds the work together. Ultimately, Benjamin's book succeeds as both a political history of twentieth-century Haiti and a compelling family saga.”
—Booklist
“This brutal, spellbinding tale is at once a searing domestic drama and an illuminating glimpse at Haiti’s history. Readers will be rapt.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A brilliant, absorbing book, a family story, a tale of power, exile, and calamity, a love letter to Benjamin’s mother that becomes a deep look into the darkness of Haitian history. And it’s also a no-holds-barred autobiography. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Salman Rushdie, author of Knife
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Story
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.
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A must read for educators and everyone!
- By Alonna on 05-06-25
By: Eve L. Ewing
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A Man of Bad Reputation
- The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction
- By: Drew A. Swanson
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina.
By: Drew A. Swanson
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President McKinley
- Architect of the American Century
- By: Robert W. Merry
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Republican President William McKinley transformed America during his two terms as president. Although he does not register large in either public memory or in historians' rankings, in this revealing account, Robert W. Merry offers "a fresh twist on the old tale . . . a valuable education on where America has been and, possibly, where it is going" (The National Review).
By: Robert W. Merry
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Firebrands
- The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition
- By: Gioia Diliberto
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In Gioia Diliberto's take on this period of history, we meet Ella Boole, the stern and ambitious leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned to introduce Prohibition. We also meet Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who served as the top federal prosecutor charged with enforcing Prohibition. Diliberto tells the story, too, of silent film star Texas Guinan, who ran New York speakeasies backed by the mob and showed that Prohibition was not only absurd but unenforceable. And, she follows Pauline Morton Sabin, a glamorous Manhattan aristocrat who mobilized the movement to kill it.
By: Gioia Diliberto
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Finding Dad
- A Vietnam War Baby's Search for Her Father and Her Family
- By: Jessica Dudley
- Narrated by: Sarah Bundy
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Jessica Dudley is a child of the Vietnam War. Her parents came from two different worlds and were not able to make things work between them. With her father returning to the United States after his tour of service and her mother staying behind to have her baby, Jessica is born into a home without love.
By: Jessica Dudley
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The World After Gaza
- A History
- By: Pankaj Mishra
- Narrated by: Mikhail Sen
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is.
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Superb analysis - and an understanding beyond the usual
- By mb on 05-11-25
By: Pankaj Mishra
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Blood and Mistletoe
- The History of the Druids in Britain
- By: Ronald Hutton
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Crushed by the Romans in the first century A.D., the ancient Druids of Britain left almost no reliable evidence behind. Historian Ronald Hutton shows how this lack of definite information has allowed succeeding British generations to reimagine, reinterpret, and reinvent the Druids. Hutton's captivating book is the first to encompass two thousand years of Druid history and to explore the evolution of English, Scottish, and Welsh attitudes toward the forever ambiguous figures of the ancient Celtic world.
By: Ronald Hutton
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Dear Miss Perkins
- A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
- By: Rebecca Brenner Graham
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins's story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story.
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Interesting account well told
- By Jacob Brier on 04-10-25
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Vice House
- Presidential Vice and Its Impact on American History
- By: Donald Elton
- Narrated by: Jamal West
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Vice House: Presidential Vice and its Impact on American History takes listeners behind the scenes of the White House to uncover the vices, scandals, and moral failings that have shaped the nation’s highest office. From the Founding Fathers to modern presidents, this book delves into the personal lives of America’s leaders to reveal how their choices influenced policy, public opinion, and the course of history.
By: Donald Elton
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Mainline Mama
- A Memoir
- By: Keeonna Harris
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was “grown.” Within a year she was pregnant and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a “mainline mama,” a parent facing the task of raising a child—while still growing up herself—with an incarcerated partner.
By: Keeonna Harris
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Last Seen
- The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
- By: Judith Giesberg
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again. As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Judith Giesberg draws on the archive that she founded to compile these stories in a narrative form for the first time.
By: Judith Giesberg
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Mornings Without Mii
- By: Mayumi Inaba
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just the size of her palm, dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii, and so begins an ineffable bond.
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Bad writing
- By la cuisiniere on 05-01-25
By: Mayumi Inaba
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Practicing New Worlds
- Abolition and Emergent Strategies
- By: Andrea J. Ritchie, Alexis Pauline Gumbs - foreword, Adrienne Maree Brown - introduction
- Narrated by: Andrea J. Ritchie
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization, and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive.
By: Andrea J. Ritchie, and others