The overall picture is not the unrelentingly gruesome story promised but rather a thoughtful series of meditations on living...
Collection of short essays about an American’s hard time in two of Thailand’s most notorious prisons.
First-time author Hoy, Californian by birth, spent an apparently dissolute youth wandering Asia. He finally settled in Thailand, first in Bangkok and then in the northern city of Chiang Mai, where he committed the crime that is never explicitly named in the short narratives that make up this prison memoir (the cover copy suggests it was related to his failure to report a friend for murder, and documents reproduced inside suggest he was charged officially as an accessory). Whatever the actual crime, he was sent to Chiang Mai Remand Prison, then given a life sentence and transferred to Bang Kwang, the country’s most notorious prison. Bang Kwang officials, writes the author, barely recognized the humanity of their wards. Prisoners were kept in crowded cells where they slept on the floor in spaces too small for their bodies. The drinking water came from the filthy river running nearby, and the food most often consisted of thin chicken broth and white rice. Hoy contracted tuberculosis and nearly died before the American embassy intervened. He was finally released to the Americans on a treaty transfer to spend the rest of his sentence in the United States. The short essays range in quality, but they all display Hoy’s keen eye for the cruel detail—e.g., the senseless torture by prison guards of a captured owl or the murder in broad daylight of a likable coffee-shop owner by an apprentice member of a gang. The author also ably captures the humanity of his fellow inmates.
The overall picture is not the unrelentingly gruesome story promised but rather a thoughtful series of meditations on living as well as possible under the worst possible conditions.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-688-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
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
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