by Loung Ung
Even with a title like that, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I'm not normally one for human strife stories, but I was compelled. The first time I saw the title, while searching for books for the Read Harder Challenge, I just had to read it. This is not your typical human strife story. ...
"Since we are all supposed to be equal, if one person starves, then all should starve." That sentence would be my pick for the one-sentence summary of the whole book. The title is a bit of a misnomer in that it is not the father of the family who actually dies first, but the implications of the t...
Like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Loung Ung’s memoir First They Killed My Father is the kind of book that leaves an indelible mark on each and every one of its readers, a book which contains a story too horrific to believe but too terrible to be a product of mere imagination. I first le...
I feel bad I didn't love this book--maybe I've been jaded by too many tales of misery and atrocity. Or maybe it's just reading this so soon after Egger's What is the What about Sudan or for that matter after Vaddey's The Shadow of the Banyan, also about this period, this book has a lot to live up to...
This is a very difficult book to read. It is not eloquently written, but how do you write about the Khmer Rouge and what they did to the Cambodian people April 1975-1980 eloquently? One traumatic event after the other, from the first to the last page. Reading it I simply wanted to get to the end. I ...
This book makes me shake my head...what these poor people went through and only 30 years ago!! The more I read about the wars in other countries, the more I realize how insane governments are and how corrupt everything in the world is. It was a good read, and made me want to read more about this ti...
Cambodia.Follow up with Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, which expresses the PTSD more clearly. These two can be read with Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge to compare two girls' experiences of the fall of Phnom Penh and the...
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