My Brother - Softcover

Kincaid, Jamaica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374525625 ISBN 13: 9780374525620

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

About this title

Review:

Compassion only occasionally lightens the grim tone of Jamaica Kincaid's searing account of her younger brother Devon's 1996 death from AIDS. As in novels such as Annie John, Kincaid is ruthlessly honest about her ambivalence toward the impoverished Caribbean nation from which she fled, her restrictive family, and the culture that imprisoned Devon. That honesty, which includes chilling detachment from her brother's suffering, is sometimes alienating. But art has its own justifications. The bitter clarity of Kincaid's prose and the tangled, undeniably human feelings it lucidly dissects are justification enough.

About the Author:

Jamaica Kincaid's books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. She lives in Vermont.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374525625
• ISBN 13: 9780374525620
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208