A truly heartening story of sheer determination and the will to survive and thrive.
A Cambodian refugee to America reflects on his arduous journey to freedom and job as a Secret Service officer.
In this harrowing yet inspiring and upbeat survival story, Oun (b. 1966), writing with Starnes, chronicles his upbringing in a poor, close-knit community in Battambang City, in northwest Cambodia. The author’s father was a lieutenant in the army, and his mother worked as a seamstress and cigarette roller. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country, and Oun’s father was taken away and vanished. Soon, destitute families were herded out of their homes and marched into the “Killing Fields,” where they endured awful conditions working in the rice paddies with little food or shelter. Oun writes poignantly about how he had his beloved dog with him until the soldiers shot him “because they could”—an episode that was indicative of the senseless violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, which the author captures vividly. Suspected by others because of his soldier father, Oun had to change his name and survive by his wits, working as a mechanic, scavenging for bugs and catching rats at night for food. He was separated from his mother and captured and tortured. The refugee camps in Thailand held their own appalling conditions and dangers, but after three years, the author found resettlement in Maryland near some relatives. His relentless tenacity, loyalty, and hard work helped him graduate from high school and college, after which he served as a correctional officer before moving on to become a Secret Service officer and K-9 specialist. “If I can survive the Killing Fields of Cambodia to become a protector of the president of the United States,” he writes, “nothing in this world is impossible. I am living proof of that.”
A truly heartening story of sheer determination and the will to survive and thrive.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781439923368
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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