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CHILDREN OF CAMBODIA'S KILLING FIELDS

MEMOIRS BY SURVIVORS

This compelling material might be even more powerfully disturbing had it been accompanied by additional explanatory and...

Horrific childhood testimonies by survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.

These 30 brief narratives were collected by Pran from now-adult survivors of Pol Pot's killing fields. Most of those included here currently reside in the US. Pran, a photojournalist whose story was featured in the movie The Killing Fields, is the founder of the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project; his wife (and co-editor of the volume) DePaul is its executive director. Comparisons to Hitler's genocide are inevitable: Here, too, a government systematically exterminated millions of innocent men, women, and children through a program of relocation, starvation, forced labor, and outright massacres. The narrators, who were only children when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, cannot, of course, explain why the regime ruthlessly murdered nearly two million of their compatriots, but perhaps criminal chaos is much of the point here. Uneducated (thus "untainted'') village children were less likely to be worked, starved, or walked to death, and were indoctrinated to disavow family ties and show loyalty to all-powerful Angka (the Khmer Rouge regime). Many children were forced to watch executions of their relatives without flinching. A few became monsters, like the six-year-old recollected by one witness here, who attacked a pregnant woman with an ax. With too little room to present a picture of the narrators' lives before and after the hellish years of 1975-79, the recorded memories are saved from a tedious repetitiveness by a few remarkable descriptions, such as that of an emaciated malaria victim with a swollen belly looking "like a frog,'' and a scavenging child finding duck eggs in a human skull.

This compelling material might be even more powerfully disturbing had it been accompanied by additional explanatory and background material.

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-300-06839-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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