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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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