Still, overall, here’s a moving story of transition, transformation, and reunion.
Activist Ung’s memoir of life after Pol Pot, a worthy sequel to First They Killed My Daughter (2004).
Both of the author’s parents, and many other relatives, were killed in the Khmer Rouge genocide. In 1980, Ung’s older brother—sponsored by a local church—was able to leave Cambodia and settle in Vermont. He could afford to take his wife and one sibling with him, but that was all, so he chose the youngest (Ung) and left her beloved sister Chou behind. The two girls didn’t meet again for another 15 years. Here, Ung tells both sisters’ stories, chronicling her own adjustment to living in Burlington and Chou’s life in Cambodia. The juxtaposition generally works well. The story of the older girl’s arranged marriage, for example, is told against the backdrop of her sister’s very American schoolgirl crushes, and Chou’s attempts to get an education contrast effectively with Ung’s comparatively luxurious studies at secondary school and then at St. Michael’s College. Not surprisingly, the chapters about the author’s personal experiences are more vivid. The scenes set in Vermont snap with vivid prose, and Ung imparts freshness to a fairly familiar immigrant’s tale. Many of her new acquaintances call her Luanne instead of Loung, so Ung tries calling herself Luanne: “The name comes out of my mouth tasting like a spoonful of vinegar.” Using food stamps at the Burlington grocery store imprints “shame stamps” on her face, marks that won’t come off no matter how hard she scrubs. In one very funny scene, the excited girl rushes outside, barely able to move thanks to all her layers of winter clothes, shouting, “Snow! Snow!” to a blasé neighbor wearing a light coat and sneakers who replies calmly, “No. Frost.” When Ung feels embarrassed, or stupid, or frustrated, the reader won’t be able to help empathizing. Chou, however, is two-dimensional, and the secondhand stories of her girlhood, though clear and interesting, remain just that: secondhand.
Still, overall, here’s a moving story of transition, transformation, and reunion.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-073394-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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