A compelling, if flawed, account of the dire Cambodian genocide and its aftermath, told by a woman who survived this...
A Cambodian immigrant to the United States tells a harrowing tale in this debut memoir that recounts her struggles and religious journey.
Sim grew up during the horrifying period in the 1970s when Pol Pot ruled Cambodia and forced urban inhabitants into the countryside. He starved, beat, tortured, and executed millions of his fellow citizens. The Khmer Rouge murdered the author’s father and forced her mother to abandon Sim in her village and travel far away to work as a virtual agricultural slave laborer. Left entirely to her own devices and compelled by circumstance to care, not just for herself, but for her two younger sisters as well, the author attempted but failed to ward off the demons of starvation. One of her sisters succumbed to hunger and died of malnutrition. “I felt as if I had been forsaken,” Sim writes. “Loneliness became my best friend and we were inseparable.” The author then miraculously encountered a mysterious, faceless woman who aided her and provided her what little comfort she had in this nightmarish world of turmoil, deprivation, and death. Sim’s discovery of Christianity and her ever-growing faith provided her a thin cord of hope to which she clung. Through her tenacity and faith, she came through this ordeal to end up with her family in a refugee camp waiting for resettlement in America. Finally, after many years, the author’s wish came true and she arrived in the United States, only to end up through an arranged marriage wedded to an emotionally abusive man. While this tale of endurance and stamina alone provides a potentially riveting focus for this small book, the exceptional authorial challenges of revealing and conveying with clarity and precision the depths of her struggles prove perhaps beyond Sim’s capacity. In comparing her own experiences with contemporary tornado survivors, the author speculates that they might well wonder what “God had next up his sleeve.” Such tone disjunctions prove at times distracting, and diffuse the power of Sim’s otherwise absorbing life story.
A compelling, if flawed, account of the dire Cambodian genocide and its aftermath, told by a woman who survived this terrible era through her personal fortitude and Christian faith.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5029-4464-1
Page Count: 94
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
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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