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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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