Download or read book After They Killed Our Father written by Loung Ung and published by Mainstream Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1980, at the age of ten, Loung Ung escaped a devastated Cambodia and flew to the US as a refugee. She and her eldest brother, with whom she escaped, left behind their three surviving siblings, and her book is alternately heart-wrenching and heart-warming, as it follows the parallel lives of Loung and her closest sister, Chou, during the 15 years it took for them to be reunited. Their two worlds were very different, and Loung's depiction of the contrast between her life in the affluent West and that of her sister, who navigated her way through landmine-strewn fields and survived raids by the Khmer Rouge, is laced with the guilt she feels about being the lucky one. This powerful story helps us to understand what happens when a family is torn apart by politics, adversity and war. It is also the compelling and inspirational tale of a remarkable woman.
Download or read book Who Killed My Father written by Edouard Louis and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father. Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.
Download or read book First They Killed My Father written by Loung Ung and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daughter of Cambodia remembers. Soon to be a Netflix original movie directed by Angelina Jolie. Until age five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of an educated, high-ranking government official. When the Khmer Rouge stormed the city in 1975, the young girl and her family fled from village to village. Fighting to hide their identity, the Ungs eventually were forced to separate to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans. As half her family died in labour camps by execution, starvation, and disease, Loung herself grew increasingly resilient and determined - armed with indomitable will, she miraculously managed to outlast the Khmer Rouge and survive the killing fields. FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER is her astonishing story, a memorable human drama of courage and survival against all odds.
Download or read book Lucky Child written by Loung Ung and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war. In alternating chapters, she gives voice to Chou, the beloved older sister whose life in war-torn Cambodia so easily could have been hers. Highlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds.
Download or read book When Dad Killed Mom written by Julius Lester and published by HMH. This book was released on 2003-06-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brother and sister cope with loss and trauma—and fight to keep what’s left of their family together—in a “compelling” novel by a Newbery Honor Medal winner. Jenna and Jeremy knew their parents’ marriage was in trouble. That was pretty obvious. But no one who knew the family could have predicted what would come next. One afternoon, Jenna and Jeremy are pulled from class and given horrifying news: their father, a college psychologist, has just shot their mother to death on a public street. Now, Mom is dead, Dad is in jail, and a fifth-grade boy and his fourteen-year-old sister have a lot to reconcile. Not only grief, anger, confusion, and guilt—but their dad’s motive, the secrets in their mother’s diary, and shifting loyalties that are driving Jenna and Jeremy even further apart. With their fragile new lives in free fall, and their father about to stand trial, they’re now going to have to confront the unimaginable. From an author who has been a finalist for the National Book Award, among numerous other honors, this is “a compelling story suffused with raw and honest emotion” (Kirkus Reviews) and “a taut psychological mystery” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book Survival in the Killing Fields written by Haing Ngor and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his academy award-winning role as Dith Pran in "The Killing Fields", for Haing Ngor his greatest performance was not in Hollywood but in the rice paddies and labour camps of war-torn Cambodia. Here, in his memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge, is a searing account of a country's descent into hell. His was a world of war slaves and execution squads, of senseless brutality and mind-numbing torture; where families ceased to be and only a very special love could soar above the squalor, starvation and disease. An eyewitness account of the real killing fields by an extraordinary survivor, this book is a reminder of the horrors of war - and a testament to the enduring human spirit.
Download or read book First They Killed My Father written by Loung Ung and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major film, co-written and directed by Angelina Jolie Until the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and being cheeky to her parents. When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Loung's family fled their home and were eventually forced to disperse to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier while her brothers and sisters were sent to labour camps. The surviving siblings were only finally reunited after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and started to destroy the Khmer Rouge. Bolstered by the bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and the gentle kindness of her sister, Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life. First They Killed My Father is an unforgettable book told through the voice of the young and fearless Loung. It is a shocking and tragic tale of a girl who was determined to survive despite the odds.
Download or read book Our Father Who Are in Hell written by James Reston, Jr. and published by Dissertation.com. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive work on the Guyana tragedy when on November 18, 1978, one thousand members of the People’s Temple cult killed themselves in a Guyana jungle by drinking poison-laced Kool-Aid. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the author obtained more than 800 hours of tape recordings made in the jungle. Reston chronicles the descent into madness of the cult leader, the Reverend Jim Jones. "Reston's eye is novelistic....His larger purpose is to make the terribly irrational somehow understandable....He does so with the good judgment of a writer willing to avoid certain faddish modes of analysis." —Robert Coles, Washington Post Book Review
Download or read book Lulu in the Sky written by Loung Ung and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concluding the trilogy that started with the bestselling memoir First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung describes her college experience and her first steps into adulthood, revealing her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward towards happiness. After the violence of the Khmer Rouge and the difficult assimilation experience of a refugee, Loung’s daily struggle to keep darkness, anger, and depression at bay will finally find two unexpected allies: the empowering call of activism, and the redemptive power of love. Lulu in the Sky is the story of Loung’s journey to a Cambodian village to reconnect with her mother’s spirit; to a vocation that will literally allow her to heal the landscape of her birth; and to the transformative influence of a supportive marriage to a loving man.
Download or read book My Mother She Killed Me My Father He Ate Me written by Kate Bernheimer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction. Neil Gaiman, “Orange” Aimee Bender, “The Color Master” Joyce Carol Oates, “Blue-bearded Lover” Michael Cunningham, “The Wild Swans” These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this thrilling celebration of fairy tales—the ultimate literary costume party. Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.
Download or read book Dreams from My Father written by Barack Obama and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman
Download or read book The Day My Daddy Died written by Rebecca Mason and published by . This book was released on 2020-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a young boy learns the news of his Father's sudden death, pain and sorrow become abruptly real. His carefree childhood is instantly altered as his once 'normal' world is turned upside down. His grief carries him through a wide range of emotions until one day he finally finds healing within and a way to hold onto his memories. A highly relatable and ultimately triumphant book that helps children reflect on the loss of a parent and find a healthy way to accept and move forward.
Download or read book Defending Jacob written by William Landay and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A legal thriller that’s comparable to classics such as Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent . . . tragic and shocking.”—Associated Press NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • Boston Globe • Kansas City Star Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney for two decades. He is respected. Admired in the courtroom. Happy at home with the loves of his life: his wife, Laurie, and their teenage son, Jacob. Then Andy’s quiet suburb is stunned by a shocking crime: a young boy stabbed to death in a leafy park. And an even greater shock: The accused is Andy’s own son—shy, awkward, mysterious Jacob. Andy believes in Jacob’s innocence. Any parent would. But the pressure mounts. Damning evidence. Doubt. A faltering marriage. The neighbors’ contempt. A murder trial that threatens to obliterate Andy’s family. It is the ultimate test for any parent: How far would you go to protect your child? It is a test of devotion. A test of how well a parent can know a child. For Andy Barber, a man with an iron will and a dark secret, it is a test of guilt and innocence in the deepest sense. How far would you go? Praise for Defending Jacob “A novel like this comes along maybe once a decade . . . a tour de force, a full-blooded legal thriller about a murder trial and the way it shatters a family. With its relentless suspense, its mesmerizing prose, and a shocking twist at the end, it’s every bit as good as Scott Turow’s great Presumed Innocent. But it’s also something more: an indelible domestic drama that calls to mind Ordinary People and We Need to Talk About Kevin. A spellbinding and unforgettable literary crime novel.”—Joseph Finder “Defending Jacob is smart, sophisticated, and suspenseful—capturing both the complexity and stunning fragility of family life.”—Lee Child “Powerful . . . leaves you gasping breathlessly at each shocking revelation.”—Lisa Gardner “Disturbing, complex, and gripping, Defending Jacob is impossible to put down. William Landay is a stunning talent.”—Carla Neggers “Riveting, suspenseful, and emotionally searing.”—Linwood Barclay
Download or read book Stay Alive My Son written by Pin Yathay and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields.With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the "New People," displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness.Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. "Stay alive, my son," he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border.First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of Stay Alive, My Son includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin Yathay's message.
Download or read book After The Heavy Rain written by Sokreaksa S. Himm and published by Monarch Books. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen of Reaksa Himm's immediate family, including both his parents, were executed by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot. The young killers marched them from the remote northern village to which they had been exiled, out into the jungle. One by one the machetes fell. Severely wounded, Reaksa was covered by the bodies of his family. His remarkable story of survival is told in 'The Tears of My Soul'. In this second book he describes how he tracked down his family's killers, one by one, embraced them, gave them a scarf of friendship and presented each with a Bible. He has also funded and had built a clinic, school and five churches in the area. This is an astonishing tale of the consequences of spiritual rebirth.
Download or read book Murder in the Family written by Jeff Blackstock and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2021 Crime Writers of Canada Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book Diplomat father. Murdered mother. Emotionally neglected children. An apparent cover-up. Family dinners will never be the same. "I think that my father murdered my mother." That terrible belief spurs author Jeff Blackstock to investigate the circumstances of his mother Carol's death when he was a child. Carol Blackstock died at age 24 in 1959--poisoned by arsenic--but the cause of her death remained shrouded in mystery for decades. Jeff's father George Blackstock was a career diplomat in Canada's foreign service, posted to glamorous Buenos Aires with his wife Carol and their three children. A little more than a year after the family's arrival, the vivacious young mother, now emaciated and in terrible pain, was transferred to Montreal for treatment of a mysterious illness that proved fatal. In the following year, George Blackstock remarried, and a young woman named Ingrid became the feared stepmother to Jeff and his two siblings. Carol's parents soon had suspicions about their son-in-law George but were unable to get justice for their daughter. Class privilege--George was the scion of a Toronto establishment family and Carol was from modest beginnings--and an aversion to scandal all figured in an apparent cover-up. But secrets have a way of eventually disrupting all families. A damning autopsy report about arsenic poisoning, found among their grandmother's effects, leads Jeff Blackstock and his sister to horrifying revelations about their father. Eventually, they confront him and accuse him of their mother's murder. But George offers only vague explanations that don't add up. George died a broken man, mostly abandoned by his adult children. A compelling story of a high-society murder, a heartbreaking tale of emotionally neglected children, and an inquiry into the power and privilege of the Anglo upper classes of the time, Murder in the Family chronicles the shocking legacy of deeply buried secrets and betrayal in one's own family.
Download or read book Happy Go Lucky written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter. In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.
