The lurid title belies the elegant poetry, honest humanity and complex culture exposed within.
Luecha’s memoir of astonishing brutality and miraculous salvation details her trials of being treated like chattel in 1960s Thailand.
The eldest child of a large, chaotic family, Luecha—Awe, as she’s known—"had been beaten since infancy." Raped for the first time when she was 4 years old, she had “the mentality of a Roman soldier” by the time she was 5. The daughter of a one-time nightclub singer and a high-ranking government official, she was surrounded in her formative years by a beloved great-grandfather, the “wise Sinsae of Nakornpathom”; a grandmother, who was more like a mother; younger siblings, mostly sisters; and a predatory stepfather, “Paw.” In order to escape Paw’s constant abuse, she ran off to Bangkok with dreams of school and a respectable job. Instead, like the frequently mentioned scent of garlic cooking, “karma” followed her in the form of repeated gang rapes and forced sexual servitude to a family of pimps, from whom she sustained “an almost daily harvest of punishment.” Her life among the young girls, who served up to seventy “Doors” (i.e., johns) a day—earning their “whalish cartoon” Boss a pretty penny—resembled a modern-day, highly sexual Dickensian universe. By 1972, when she was 14 and relatively free, Luecha estimates she was raped more than 9,000 times. Through her strength of character, modeled on her movie hero, Steve McQueen, and her passion for books, Luecha escaped her captors, returned home and put her siblings through school. Luecha’s astonishing gift for conjuring the smells, sights and sounds of her rich, turbulent homeland often captivates, despite the sometimes-unbearable pain and suffering she and others endured. Assured writing dotted with delightful similes and Thai expressions carries the reader through multiple detailed horrors with unexpected bursts of beauty and joy. Most surprisingly, Luecha retained her childlike sense of humor through the darkness. After a beating, Luecha writes, “My left eyeball disappeared for awhile [sic] behind a red curtain.” Her best friend and “model of cool,” Ying, simply told her she looked “like an angry squirrel.”
The lurid title belies the elegant poetry, honest humanity and complex culture exposed within.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479168422
Page Count: 442
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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