reviews
While I am usually a sucker for auto/biographical works for the More...
This book not only gives insight into Loung’s personal More...
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
More...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...
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...
Under Pol Pot, people were forced to leave their homes in the cities and move into the countryside where the More...
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...
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...
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...
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
More...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...
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...
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...
It’s hard to imagine that Loung Ung could accurately remember all More...
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...
What is so gripping and terrifying about this memoir is that not just the grim story, but that Ung is a beautiful wri More...

