Celebrates survival but also provides a street-level view of Khmer atrocities in a powerful reminder of what can happen when...
In this death-defying family saga, Lau chronicles her slow, agonizing escape from Cambodia during the country’s gruesome revolution in the 1970s.
Lau describes her parents’ upbringing, their arranged marriage, and her own childhood in a claustrophobic neighborhood. Lau was still a young girl when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and she maintains the perspective of a child throughout, as when her passenger train was raided by death squads. “Those captured were on their hands and knees at gunpoint,” she says. “As time dragged on, the chaos and the delay seemed an eternity. My bladder was at the point of rupture, so I held and held and even used my hands to stop the dam from bursting.” Each chapter brings some new horror: massacres, midnight firefights, laborers worked to death, a harrowing march through land mine–infested mountains. In one scene, a starving man ate too much food and died. The book stoically documents these tragedies, with Lau’s honesty and attention to detail bringing that appalling era into focus. From the earliest chapters, Lau’s family considers fleeing to Thailand, but even if they reach the border alive, Thai security may turn them away, sentencing them to certain death. The story has its share of symbolism, too: Lau’s father ran a camera shop, and when the family was forced into a labor camp, he retained his cameras; the useless equipment became a metaphor for the stable life they lost. Later, Meiyeng maintained a verdant garden. Passing soldiers conclude that Meiyeng would never contemplate escape after putting so much work into her vegetable beds. Through it all, Lau’s mother remained stern and strong. Her name, Meiyeng, translates to “beautiful hero,” and Lau credits the unflappable matron with the family’s survival. The sickening suspense will haunt readers to the end.
Celebrates survival but also provides a street-level view of Khmer atrocities in a powerful reminder of what can happen when revolutionaries turn tyrannical.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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