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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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