This was a horrific story of the terror and violence that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the innocent people of Cambodia. Loung is the daughter of a high ranking government official, and the very type of family that the Khmer Rouge despise. The family tree to flee, pretending to be poor farmers, but are eventually imprisoned in a camp. The camp hardships and fear take their toll on the family and things get worse when they are all gradually separated into different camps, not knowing if they will More...

There are some things left unlearned from history books. You can read about the Cambodian genocide from many other sources that will explain the facts and statistics in the traditional sterile style that historic texts usually take. You can actually witness the places and things that history has left behind. And then, you can dive into personal accounts of history; how humanity struggles to survive during some of its darkest hours.
While I am usually a sucker for auto/biographical works for the More...

I just finished reading this book - another one I had a hard time putting down - I read it in 3 days. I learned so much from this memoir which takes place, starting in April 1975 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. At this point the Cambodian Civil War has not quite taken hold. The narrator of the story is a 5 year old girl, the 2nd to youngest in a family of 7 children. She comes from a rather well-off, very loving middle-class family who live in the capital of Cambodia; Phenom Penh. The 5 year old takes More...

When reading First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung, the audience is exposed to a compelling book filled with adventure and tragedy. It is about a girl who lives a fairly comfortable life in Phnom Penh with her parents and siblings. When the Khmer Rouge takes over Cambodia, her family is forced to flee into separate labor camps. As the story progresses, it is startling to comprehend that the book is actually a memoir. This is her story.
This book not only gives insight into Loung’s personal More...

I read this book in prepartion to our trip to Cambodia in April. I would have read it anyway, however, because I love depressing autobiographies. This one was far different than any other I have ever read being that it was from a child's perspective. It retold her unbelievable story of escaping the killing fields during Pol Pot's reign with the Khmer Rouge. I think everyone in my generation needs to read this book. Many people my age do not even know Pol Pot's name, moreless that he killed over More...

This was a heart-breaking memoir. It was very difficult to read . . . but imagine how much harder it was to live it.

This memoir by Loung Ung tells the tale of her childhood in Cambodia during the takeover of the Khmer Rouge. She aptly presents herself as a child narrator, and so the horror and confusion that takes place around her are somewhat subdued as the narrator struggles to understand what is happening to her and why. It’s no surprise that she turns to anger to help her survive.

At the beginning of each chapter she gives the reader a date. April 1975. I couldn’t help but think what I was doing at that ti More...

On Monday I finished reading First They Killed My Father which is the autobiographical story of a young girl's experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. I've read a lot of books like this and I usually find them uplifting but this book just made me sad. In Rwanda, you see people's incredible resilience and determination to overcome the prejudices of the past. When I read the story of the boy solider, A Long Way Gone, I was heartened by the knowledge that he had escaped that life and

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Millions of Cambodians suffered from all kinds of atrocities - the American bombings, displacement,starvation, communist killings, genocide, and other such violence during the 70s Specifically during the time of Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot Regime), 1975-1979.

This book is a chilling, deeply touching, eye-opening and educational narrative of an American Cambodian woman who was a child during the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot Regime).

In response to this book (one of the first recollections of the regime from a s More...

2/6/08
Great book. This is the first book I've read by Loung Ung and so far I'm not a big fan of her writing style (it seems predictable and borrowed). But.. the book is excellent, mostly because it is a five-year-old's perspective on living and dying during Pol Pot's cleansing project in Cambodia. It's an interesting perspective because it is based on a mix of innocence, confusion, blind trust, fear, an innate need for self-preservation and the amazing ability that children have to sense and und More...

I, literally, abandoned this book half-way through. I may not be an expert on good prose but I definitely recognize when I am NOT privy to such. This novel rests on the fact that it is an account of real events. A people's version of one of the "greatest-atrocities-of-the-twentieth-century." I don't intend to demean the subject matter here, but a lot of this book regurgitates, unquestioningly, a textbook understanding of the Khmer Rouge. The author blantly inserts generic socio-political backsto More...

This is one of the most powerful books I've read. It's an autobiography of a young girl and her family during the oppressive Pol Pot regime. I traveled to Cambodia last year with only a faint idea of what the Khmer Rouge was and of what actually happened in that country in the late 1970s. Loung Ung's story is a story is one of survival. If it weren't, it would be too heartbreaking to bear.

Under Pol Pot, people were forced to leave their homes in the cities and move into the countryside where the More...

A memoir by Loung Ung who was a small child in Cambodia in Pol Pot's Khmer Rough. She tells her story from being a five-year-old living a wonderful life to overnight being sent to work camps, starvation, loss of family members. This took place when I was in middle school, and I was totally oblivious to things happening in other parts of the world. What an eye-opener to read of the struggle to live day by day, hour by hour. I pulled up her website and read more about her life and the spokeperson More...

One of those "I know I have things to do but I can't put this book down" books! Tragedy described from a child's perspective that can be multiplied untold numbers of times from Cambodia to Darfur to other places where evil reigns, darkness is twenty-four hours a day, and most people either don't know or don't care...and I am afraid it is more the latter. Read this book and you will identify with William Wilberforce who said, "now that you have heard (read) this you may turn and look the other wa More...

No history book could portray at this personal level the terror and brutal killings inflicted on the Cambodian people. I felt in my heart every moment of this story, which made me realize how lucky it is just to be living. Although Loung begins as a childish character that made me pretty frustrated about how she only thought about herself it accurately portrays how the Khmer Rouge took away her childhood as she was forced to become mature before she was allowed to be a kid. In such a situation I More...

I bought this book in Cambodia after visiting the Killing Fields & the horrific S-21 prison camp several years ago and it completely blew me away. If ever you wanted to get a real sense of the horrors inflicted by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from a human perspective then this is the book to buy.

A harrowing & honest first hand account as told through the eyes of a young girl who is herself eventually trained as a child soldier. Heartbreaking & beautifully written, I literally could n More...

Until I close the end cover of this book, I could not stop from shaking and crying. This tragic story conveys such an atrocity of Polpot's regime, one of the most barbarous communist regimes. I read many survival accounts but this one definitely stands out among them. Not the words, or phrases that hit me but the very sentiment of such a young child whose only hope is to simply survive amidst the Cambodian genocide. I was in fact in Cambodia while I was reading this. After visiting Killing Field More...

I read this book in Cambodia. I bought it at a corner store outside of the Tuol Sleng Museum, a former high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture site in the late 1970s. Ms. Ung's story is deeply disturbing (and probably not too unusual) and her memoir does a good job keeping its unsavory details palatable.

The flow of the narrative, as well as the paucity of factual evidence, makes it difficult to put down. The book is a great jumping-off point for those looking to take their first More...

Loung Ung, one of seven children living a privileged life with their parents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, tells the story of how the family is forced to flee in April 1975 when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge storm the city. The family is split up and some members die as a result of the unbelievable hardships they have to face. After the father is taken away and murdered in 1977, the mother makes the excruciating decision that her three younger children aged 12, 10 and 7 will stand a better chance of survival More...

First they killed my Father is a captivating book that tells the story of what happened to a girl born into a middle class family during a Cambodian war. This book captures the real emotion of the Author, making you feel as if you were really there. Loung Ung and her family all face internal conflicts when having to survive in something I would call a Camodian Holocaust.

This book begins with Loung Ung a age five having to be exiled out of her hometown of Phnom Pehn along with the rest of her fam More...

Amazon.com Review

Written in the present tense, First They Killed My Father will put you right in the midst of the action--action you'll wish had never happened. It's a tough read, but definitely a worthwhile one, and the author's personality and strength shine through on every page. Covering the years from 1975 to 1979, the story moves from the deaths of multiple family members to the forced separation of the survivors, leading ultimately to the reuniting of much of the family, followed by mar

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Carlos Meyreles


The book that I chose to read for my summer assignment was “First,They Killed My Father” By Lounge Ung. I chose this book because it was a autobiography and I like autobiographies because it tells history and within those books you get to read about someones life and what they have went through.What I learned about the Event from the book was that people we not treated as they should be and we treated like dogs.Lounge went through a hard time because she went from being wealthy to More...

This Summer I’ve decided to read the book “First, They Killed My Father” by Loung Ung. This story is takes place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge through the eyes of author Loung Ung. Loung’s family set to escape to Vietnam, and prepare to leave to United States of America.
The reason why I chose this book is because the title just sounded intriguing and I wanted to know who killed her father. Another reason I chose this book is because I like to read books that come from the author More...

I was blown away by the story contained in this book.

To give you some idea of context - I was born in 1976. The year I was born Loung Ung was five years old and living in Phenom Penh, Cambodia. Her life was relatively good (although nothing like mine here in the States). Her prize possession was a red dress. She had six siblings, and a father and mother who loved her.

Then the Civil War taking place in Cambodia stepped in and became personal for Loung and her family (and millions of other Cambodi More...

This is a personal account of a girl who's family went through the Khmer Rouge/Pol Pot regime's "killing fields." Her father was a high official in the Lon Nol regime living in Phnom Penh. The capital was evacuated the day it was captured and they family, pretending to be poor farmers was sent to a variety of camps and villages where deprivation, beatings, slow starvation ensued. Eventually she survives and immigrates to the US.

It’s hard to imagine that Loung Ung could accurately remember all More...

The author’s purpose of writing this book was to tell the story of her life. She wanted to inform people of what happened to her when she was only 5 years old. The Khmer Roung ran everyone out of the Cambodian Village that she was living in with her family. They had to move in with their aunt and uncle, where they later were ran out of that city too.

The theme of this book is survival and perseverance. The Ung family must find food and shelter while they travel from city to city. They had to per More...

“First They Killed My Father” by Loung Ung (published 2000) is a personal narrative of a female survivor of the genocide that took place in Cambodia in the 1970s. Loung Ung was only five years old when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh (April, 1975). She was one of seven children in a middle-class family who were forced to flee their homes. They became fugitives, denying their true identity and seeking refuge in the countryside. Her story is heart-wrenching, describing the horrendous scenes More...

I enjoyed reading the book and felt that Ung was a good writer. As the book is based on her life between the ages of five and ten, some of the memories may not been very accurate and can be put down to her vivid imagination. I don’t think you can take the book as 100% accurate because it’s highly unlikely she would be able to remember early childhood memories in that much detail. However, it does give a picture of what life was like under the Khmer Rouge and some of the experiences that people w More...

Though recently I have discovered how much I enjoy memoirs, I was really dreading reading this one for our OSC bookclub. I think it’s obvious from the title why anyone might not want to read this particular memoir. And let me assure you, Ung does not hold anything back in this description of her family’s experiences from age 5 to 9 under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

What is so gripping and terrifying about this memoir is that not just the grim story, but that Ung is a beautiful wri More...