Told in simple prose, this is a shocking and devastating tale of a country’s utter contempt for its citizens.
A terrifying true story of life in North Korea.
Ishikawa was born in Japan in 1947 to a Korean father and Japanese mother. His father taught him that North Korea’s Kim Il sung was an “invincible general made of steel.” In 1958, the leader urged all Koreans to return home, proclaiming, “North Korea is a paradise on earth!” In 1960, Ishikawa and his family settled in the North Korean village of Dong Chong-ri as part of a mass repatriation campaign. Everyone had to join the Worker’s Party and pledge allegiance to Kim. The author learned in school that “thought was not free,” and no one could question the wisdom of Kim. He “played along” but knew he was now part of a “pseudo-religious cult.” Working on a farm as part of the Youth League, he learned that the sole cause of any failure was a total lack of respect for Kim and the party. Everyone was brainwashed. Despite being an excellent student, he was Japanese, the “lowest of the low,” and therefore condemned to the “very bottom of society.” As he notes, the farming process was “staggeringly crude and idiotic.” Food was taken away from them, and old people worked until they died. Poor workers went to concentration camps or were executed: “So many lives wasted.” After an arranged marriage, Ishikawa had a son in 1972. His mother died, and he carried her corpse on his back and buried her on a mountainside. His family suffered horribly, reduced to eating weeds and tree bark. It was even worse after Kim Jong il became leader. After 36 years and in utter despair, Ishikawa risked his life and, in darkness, crossed the Yalu River into China. He hoped to work in Japan and send money to his family, but by then, he was Korean, and the transition was extremely difficult.
Told in simple prose, this is a shocking and devastating tale of a country’s utter contempt for its citizens.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3690-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.
An acclaimed Mexican-born poet’s account of the sometimes-overwhelming struggles he and his parents faced in their quest to become American citizens.
Hernandez Castillo (Cenzontle, 2018, etc.) first came to the United States with his undocumented Mexican parents in 1993. But life in the shadows came at a high price. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided their home on multiple occasions and eventually deported the author’s father back to Mexico. In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family’s traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation. Of his own personal experiences, he writes, “when I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility.” To protect himself against possible identification as an undocumented person, he excelled in school and learned English “better than any white person, any citizen.” When he was old enough to work, he created a fake social security card to apply for the jobs that helped him support his fatherless family. After high school, he attended college and married a Mexican American woman. He became an MFA student at the University of Michigan and qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed him to visit his father in Mexico, where he discovered the depth of his cultural disorientation. Battling through ever present anxiety, the author revisited his and his parents’ origins and then returned to take on the difficult interview that qualified him for a green card. His footing in the U.S. finally solidified, Hernandez Castillo unsuccessfully attempted to help his father and mother qualify for residency in the U.S. Only after his father was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel was the author able to help his mother, whose life was now in danger, seek asylum in the U.S. Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream.
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282559-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Lionel Dahmer, father of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, here writes one of the most courageous, unsensational books ever written about serial murder. It does not even summarize Jeffrey's crimes. Dahmer takes upon himself much of the guilt for his son's acts by considering a genetic predisposition to murder he may have passed on to his son; various acts of his own moral blindness that may have contributed to his son's deprived emotional being; and things he did and didn't do when certain symptoms appeared that might have alerted him to Jeffrey's lust for sexual atrocity. What parts of the father, the book asks, are replicated in the son? Largely, Jeffrey is a failure whose failings were earlier those of his father, though the father overcame each failing as its pain grew. Intellectually and physically inferior as a child, Lionel was tutored by his parents from first grade on, and by dint of hard study earned a doctorate in chemistry. A puny child, he took up body-building as a teenager and turned himself into a fine physical specimen. But he also had murderous dreams from which he would awake trembling. Jeffrey's mother was also a depressive, and her excessive pill-taking during pregnancy may well have damaged Jeffrey's genes. As a child, he developed a testicular hernia that, when treated by surgery, gave him a fear of castration and seemed to lead into lasting withdrawal from his family and friendships and, by the time he was 15, into alcoholism and a liking for dead things. Lionel sees Jeffrey's main psychotic trigger lying in a need to control: his own need for intellectual and physical control resulted in a glass wall between himself and Jeffrey; Jeffrey's need for control grew into a need for drugged or dead lovers who submitted to him absolutely. Clear, modest, intelligent—and extremely disturbing.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12156-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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