Still, overall, here’s a moving story of transition, transformation, and reunion.
Activist Ung’s memoir of life after Pol Pot, a worthy sequel to First They Killed My Daughter (2004).
Both of the author’s parents, and many other relatives, were killed in the Khmer Rouge genocide. In 1980, Ung’s older brother—sponsored by a local church—was able to leave Cambodia and settle in Vermont. He could afford to take his wife and one sibling with him, but that was all, so he chose the youngest (Ung) and left her beloved sister Chou behind. The two girls didn’t meet again for another 15 years. Here, Ung tells both sisters’ stories, chronicling her own adjustment to living in Burlington and Chou’s life in Cambodia. The juxtaposition generally works well. The story of the older girl’s arranged marriage, for example, is told against the backdrop of her sister’s very American schoolgirl crushes, and Chou’s attempts to get an education contrast effectively with Ung’s comparatively luxurious studies at secondary school and then at St. Michael’s College. Not surprisingly, the chapters about the author’s personal experiences are more vivid. The scenes set in Vermont snap with vivid prose, and Ung imparts freshness to a fairly familiar immigrant’s tale. Many of her new acquaintances call her Luanne instead of Loung, so Ung tries calling herself Luanne: “The name comes out of my mouth tasting like a spoonful of vinegar.” Using food stamps at the Burlington grocery store imprints “shame stamps” on her face, marks that won’t come off no matter how hard she scrubs. In one very funny scene, the excited girl rushes outside, barely able to move thanks to all her layers of winter clothes, shouting, “Snow! Snow!” to a blasé neighbor wearing a light coat and sneakers who replies calmly, “No. Frost.” When Ung feels embarrassed, or stupid, or frustrated, the reader won’t be able to help empathizing. Chou, however, is two-dimensional, and the secondhand stories of her girlhood, though clear and interesting, remain just that: secondhand.
Still, overall, here’s a moving story of transition, transformation, and reunion.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-073394-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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