Despite the nightmarish undertones of violence and despair, a nimble, probing, memorable story that ought not be overlooked...
A remarkable as-told-to memoir of survival, combining frequent reveries regarding the fragile beauty and traditions of Cambodia with an often horrifying narrative of the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge.
Relief worker Lafreniere indicates in her prefatory note that this book evolved as “a literary account of a personal experience told by one person and written by another.” She first met Daran Kravanh, a Cambodian refugee, in 1992 at the Refugee Assistance Program of Tacoma, Washington. Her account of Kravanh’s sufferings and exile sacrifices neither immediacy nor authenticity in its telling; Lafreniere’s clean prose captures the lilt and fragility of Kravanh’s voice. Their collaborative prose is graceful and clear, firmly anchored to an enduring cultural history reliant upon an abundance of natural spiritual metaphors, Buddhist roots, and the prominence of familial roles in determining larger social bonds. It is perhaps partly on account of the very gentleness of the Cambodian people (a trait reflected in the voice of Kravanh’s narrative) that the Khmer Rouge were able to come to power in the first place. Though the nature of their regime is well known, Kravanh is able to offer fresh perspectives, tracing how the faction broadened its reach gradually and insidiously during the early years of its rise, and he even arrives at difficult insights regarding his countrymen’s susceptibility to this particular evil. The tale of Kravanh’s endurance is not pretty: over the years, he is shifted between various communal projects where hunger is enforced and infractions against Angkar (the Khmer state) bring summary execution, and he eventually loses most of his family (beginning with his father, a highly regarded police official) to the bloodthirsty regime. His survival comes through startling, seemingly foreordained means: early on he finds an abandoned accordion (an instrument he had learned to play as a child), and he is frequently saved from execution or otherwise rewarded by Khmer soldiers who wish to hear him play. This provides a subtle commentary on the loneliness and need underlying the most bestial of human impulses.
Despite the nightmarish undertones of violence and despair, a nimble, probing, memorable story that ought not be overlooked among recently published, higher-profile Khmer-era Cambodian narratives.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8248-2227-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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