by Vicheara Houn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2017
This worthy memoir provides a chilling account of the abusive relationship that the author fell into after she fled to...
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A survivor of Cambodia’s Killing Fields chronicles her journey toward recovery in this sequel.
In the first volume of her autobiography, Houn (Prison Without Walls, 2012) described the horrors of her native Cambodia under the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, during which she lost her entire family and was subjected to starvation and forced to work as a slave laborer. This second installment shares her later experiences as she absconded to Thailand and eventually immigrated to the U.S., all the while wrestling with the terrible demons of trauma. PTSD, she writes, is “an invisible war. It is my past doing battle with my present. The trauma of this war has wounded my soul.” After her escape, Houn ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, where she met Meng, a “man with Chinese eyes and thin lips” who introduced himself as a distant cousin on her father’s side. After she moved in with him, she endured another nightmare as Meng, a brutal alcoholic and womanizer, tormented and emotionally abused her. “Men can do anything they want,” he told her. “A man is gold, nothing sticks. A woman is like a white cloth, everything sticks.” In this vivid and disturbing account, Houn is unsparing in her detailing of what became her second marriage. After one suicide attempt, she was unable to answer when a doctor asked her, “Why did you harm yourself?” She reasoned: “What would happen if I told the truth? My husband would hurt me more or he would mock and laugh at me until I went mad.” In the U.S., a conversation with a co-worker whose son, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered from PTSD left her frozen in fear: “I knew I had PTSD!!!” Houn deftly describes how she found recovery through a combination of acupuncture, massage, meditation, and Reiki therapy. “I have found that the first person I had to forgive was myself,” she discovered. “I was a blameless victim of forces much greater than myself.” The volume could have dispensed with the somewhat stilted observations of a psychologist that conclude every chapter. But overall, Houn provides a valuable addition to the literature of PTSD survival.
This worthy memoir provides a chilling account of the abusive relationship that the author fell into after she fled to Thailand.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1502-1
Page Count: 322
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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