Family & Childhood Books - Page 3

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (P.S.)

Loung Ung

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 152 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Review 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book is very well-written. Loung Ung wrote with compassion,spirtual, and horrenic activities growing up under the Khmer Rogue regime. She experiences tortues,stravation, and execution of her parents. This book is very interesting to learn what the author went through live under a horrendous communist movement. The author wrote this book in a sense to give the reader an image on the conflict of war that is going in Cambodia. Readers would not be able to put this book down since it give the readers a hint of life growing up in the Khmer Rouge. Ung had to move from different works camps at a young age, and she experienced a hardship growing up in Cambodia during the 1974 to 1979. Between these two years, she watch baby brother died of stravation and the loss of his parent by the Khmer Rogue. Having to travel a large distance to Vietnam, Loung experience the execution of her people. The book will change your prespective of life and the mistery of what the cambodia people been through during the killing field years. Highly recommened to any type of readers.

Editorial Review:

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.

Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Carlos Eire

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 71 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other - but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear - spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died - and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Oliver Sacks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals–also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes–in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

Michael Patrick MacDonald

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 183 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A best-selling classic in a fresh new paperback edition

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty.

"All Souls is a memoir filled with desperation and despair, but there is also hope in it . . . [MacDonald's] discovery of his vocation in neighborhood activism is a refreshing change from most memoirs, which so often . . . are largely concerned with describing an ascent to celebrityhood."
—Julian Moynahan, New York Review of Books

"Michael Patrick MacDonald takes us on a heartbreaking tour of his South Boston family."
—Frank McCourt, Irish America Magazine

Please Stop Laughing At Me...: One Woman's Inspirational Story

Jodee Blanco

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 142 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not entirely believable 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I found the author's accounts of bullying to be interesting and dramatic enough to keep me reading but I struggled with the believability of her experiences. Being held down and punched and kicked, suffocated and thrown into traffic exceeds bullying and ventures into the realm of assault. Perhaps in her time the bullying experiences were more severe. Kids don't get away with doing things like that twice in this day and age. I also think she may be exercising a slight bias toward herself being the complete victim without any provoking or invitation on her part. It's interesting how at each new school she started in she HAD a circle of friends almost immediately and those friends were part of the popular crowd. She also had multiple instances of boys taking interest in her. This tells me that it wasn't her looks or style that caused these friends to turn on her. She did come off as having a holier-than-thou attitude and even now in the writing style you can tell she is a bit of a braggart who demands attention. Kids in junior high and high school can pick up on this pretty easily. It's fine to have good morals but some of the occurances in the book made me roll my eyes a bit. If she would have with-held a couple of things from her mother (who in turn always went right to the teachers and other parents) she may have survived a little longer at these schools. The boy/girl party scene comes to mind first. All in all, I found it interesting but not really helpful or believable.

Editorial Review:

In her poignant work, Jodee Blanco tells how school became a frightening and painful place, where threats, humiliation, and assault were as much a part of her daily experience as bubblegum and lip-gloss were for others. It is an unflinching look at what it means to be an outcast, how even the most loving parents can get it wrong, why schools fail, and how bullying is both misunderstood and mishandled.

The Coalwood Way

Homer Hickam

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the #1 bestselling author of October Sky comes this rich, unforgettable tale. With the same dazzling storytelling that distinguished his first memoir, Homer Hickam takes us deeper into the soul of his West Virginia hometown at a moment when its unique way of life is buffeted by forces of time and change.

It is fall 1959. Homer “Sonny” Hickam and his fellow Rocket Boys are in their senior year at Big Creek High, and the town of Coalwood finds itself at a painful crossroads.

The strains can be felt within the Hickam home, where Homer Sr. struggles to save the mine, and his wife, Elsie, is feeling increasingly isolated from both her family and the townspeople. Sonny, despite a blossoming relationship with a local girl, finds his own mood darkened by an unexplainable sadness.

Then, with the holidays approaching, trouble at the mine and the arrival of a beautiful young outsider bring unexpected changes in both the Hickam family and the town of Coalwood ... as this luminous memoir moves toward its poignant conclusion.

The Florist's Daughter

Patricia Hampl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Did not love it... 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

With great reviews and glowing praise from a piece on MPR our bookclub thought this would be an excellent read. I didn't love it. OK, not one of us even liked it. I felt that overall the book could not capture my attention. We have enjoyed everything from Don't Let's Eat With The Dogs Tonight, to The Life of PI, to The Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Everyone felt that while The Florist's Daughter was well written, it was a snooze. I am glad I did not buy it here, I am glad I checked it out from the library. If you have a connection to St. Paul you would probably get a kick out of the history. Otherwise, skip it. If you want to read a great memoir, read The Glass Castle!

Editorial Review:

During the long farewell of her mother’s dying, Patricia Hampl revisits her Midwestern girlhood. Daughter of a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entrŽe into St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. The Florist’s Daughter is a tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people. Its concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to midcentury middle America. At the heart of this book is the humble passion of people who struggled out of the Depression into a better chance, not only for themselves but for the common good. Widely recognized as one of our most masterful memoirists, Patricia Hampl has written her most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.

(20071001)

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Dylan Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In print for fifty years, this gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old from its very first edition.<.B>

Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.

"The piece continues to work beautifully, blending the mock heroics of childhood with enduring images of the annual rituals of the season.... The language is enchanting and the poetry shines with an unearthly radiance."—The New York Times

"In a voice more alluring than Circe's, Thomas recalls 'All the Christmases that roll down toward the two-tongued sea.'"—Publishers Weekly

"Surely this Christmas story ranks among the great experiences of the language."—Harper's Magazine

"If you'd rather not gather your holiday eve around the TV, then build a fire and try a new tradition fixed back in Wales.... How he laced so many lines with perfect imagery is beyond me...this book is a holiday pearl."—The Bloomsbury Review

"This is a story to stir one's own emotions, with recollections perhaps untapped since childhood."—Baltimore Evening SunBR>
"Try it for a break from violent robots."—The Providence Journal-Bulletin