Having survived the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian refugee Paul Thai made his way to the US in 1981. Here, told choppily by free-lancer Fiffer (Chicago magazine, Inside Sports, etc.) is Thai's story from his family's escape into Thailand to his days with the Dallas Police Department. Sponsored by the International Rescue Committee, Thai, then 18, and his family left the Thai-Cambodian border refugee camps and flew directly from Bangkok to Dallas. Following the horrors of the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975 and the later fighting between the Vietnamese and the ``Cambodian Freedom Fighters,'' Thai's middle- class family arrived in Texas—a place where cowboys ``shoot you down in the street''—with all the attendant cultural confusion. Placed in the ``Little Asia'' section of East Dallas, Thai, who desperately wanted to go to school, was given a job as a school custodian. He quickly learned English and volunteered as a translator with local churches and relief agencies for other refugees. When the Dallas police founded the East Dallas Community and Refugees Affairs Office (a ``storefront'' police outpost), Thai was a natural choice as a police service officer (PSO). Though PSOs went unarmed, they were required to attend the full 17 weeks at the police academy. Still thinking he might become a teacher, Thai liked police work so much that he became a US citizen and went through the academy again, this time to become a full police officer. He became discouraged, however, at the hostility and discrimination he faced from training officers and members of the community, and quit during his field training to continue his education. As of January 1991, Thai was attending the Univ. of Texas and considering reapplying to the police academy. While not the most scintillating of stories, the insights Fiffer provides into cross-cultural difficulties and the horrific descriptions of the killing fields and the refugee camps lend this an undeniable urgency. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1991
ISBN: 1-55778-326-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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