A valuable and inspiring, but sometimes scant, personal record of survival.
A Cambodian looks back upon his slavery in the killing fields of Cambodia, his escape and fight against the Khmer Rouge, and his immigration to the U.S.
In this memoir, first-time author Yom gives an eyewitness account of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge against fellow Cambodians. In 1975, at the age of 14, Yom was separated from his family after the Khmer Rouge assumed power and forced him to help build dams, plant rice, and help bury fellow prisoners whom the Khmer Rouge had killed. To supplement his starvation rations of rice gruel, Yom ate anything he could find: frogs, mice, rats, grasshoppers, and snakes. In 1978, he escaped and joined the Cambodian Freedom Army. Outnumbered and outgunned, the army nevertheless rescued Cambodians from the killing fields and engaged in guerrilla warfare with the Khmer Rouge. Yom, who claims to have helped save 10,000 lives, rose to lead a crew of 300 soldiers but deserted when he learned his family was in a refugee camp in Thailand. Rejoining his family, he eventually immigrated to Ellensburg, Washington, to join other family members. This book gives a grisly firsthand account of the appalling brutality that took place in Cambodia. It’s a grotesque catalog of the horrors of the killing fields—workers were murdered when they broke tools or were too weak to work; the living were tossed in mass graves with the dead; crudely built dams collapsed and killed thousands; corpses came apart in workers’ hands as they cleared rice paddies. Yom balances his despairing tale of human evil and misery with the more admirable human qualities of grit and courage, shown by resisters. Despite its horrific subject, the book’s an easy read: well-written, clear, and concise—too concise, in some ways, in that Yom could have given deeper descriptions of the prisoners, soldiers, and family members he lived with. Few personalities emerge in more than sketchy detail. Some geopolitical context would have been helpful too—for instance, Yom recounts firefights with Vietnamese soldiers without sufficiently explaining what Vietnam was doing in Cambodia.
A valuable and inspiring, but sometimes scant, personal record of survival.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5850-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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