Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America
Author: Sichan Siv
While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls.
Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand."
He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.
Publishers Weekly
Slave labor. Death marches. Refugee camps. Not the path most diplomats follow to the corridors of power. But that's just the road Siv traveled in this mostly gripping firsthand account of pain, perseverance and survival. In 1975, Siv, scion of a middle-class Cambodian family, got caught up in the murderous campaign of social re-engineering unleashed on that Southeast Asian country in the wake of the Vietnam War. "We saw decomposing bodies with arms tied behind their backs. One had the throat slit open. One had a big black mark on the back of the neck. A woman had a baby still at her breast," Siv writes of the scene following the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh. Later, forced to leave his beloved family behind in a labor camp, he sets out to find freedom. "I was the loneliest person on earth," Siv writes. "Not knowing what had happened to Mae [his mother], my sister, and my brother was torturing me. But I had to move onward." Siv survives countless brushes with death, but makes it to Thailand and eventually the U.S. At times, incidents, people and places pile on top of each other without much space for the reader to reflect on or make sense of them. Still, the story is always compelling, and Siv moves the narrative forward by raw force of will. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
The uplifting saga of a man who escaped genocidal Cambodia, became a U.S. citizen, then served in the Bush I and Bush II administrations. After recounting his privileged childhood and adolescence, Siv chronicles six years of "life under the sword" as the fledgling Cambodian republic battled first the North Vietnamese and then the murderous Khmer Rouge. After this communist faction took Phnom Penh in April 1975, the author, a college graduate and teacher, was relegated to grueling slave labor. In 1976, he worked up the courage to escape, crossing the border into Thailand on foot. Sponsored by an American family in Wallingford, Conn., Siv immigrated at age 28 to the United States, where the second half of his memoir takes place. After menial employment in restaurants and a stint as a New York City cab driver, he gained admission to the Columbia School of International Affairs and graduated into white-collar jobs. Eventually, Siv's intelligence and ambition brought him to the attention of prominent Republicans, who recruited him into the administration of George H.W. Bush as a deputy assistant for public liaison, charged with informing Americans from various organized constituencies, including uprooted Cambodians and other Southeast Asians, about the president's policies. He was able to return to Cambodia on official missions, and he shares his understandably strong emotions as well as his findings of fact while observing his native country's struggles to return to a civilized state. Writing in his adopted language of English, Siv relies heavily on cliches and oversimplified scenarios, proclaiming his love for America in chapter after chapter. His chatty prose is easy to absorb, but hiseditor ought to have insisted on logical transitions between scene shifts. After George W. Bush entered the White House, Siv returned to politics, this time as a deputy ambassador to the United Nations, serving until 2006. Occasionally tedious, but often moving and frequently educational.
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The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows
Author: Gabor Boritt
The words Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg comprise perhaps the most famous speech in history. Many books have been written about the Gettysburg Address and yet, as Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt shows, there is much that we don't know about the speech. In The Gettysburg Gospel he tears away a century of myths, lies, and legends to give us a clear understanding of the greatest American's greatest speech.
In the aftermath of the bloodiest battle ever fought in North America, the little town of Gettysburg was overwhelmed. This was where Lincoln had to come to explain why the horror of war must continue. Boritt shows how Lincoln responded to the politics of the time, as well as how and when he wrote the various versions of his remarks. Few people initially recognized the importance of the speech, but over the years it would grow into American scripture, acquiring new and broader meanings.
Based on years of scholarship as well as a deep understanding of Lincoln and of Gettysburg itself, The Gettysburg Gospel is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, or American history
Publishers Weekly
In this engrossing study, Civil War scholar Boritt (editor of The Lincoln Enigma) offers a revealing history of that most famous piece of American oratory, the Gettysburg Address. Boritt opens with an evocative description of a stench-filled, corpse-strewn Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, after the battle. When Lincoln arrived a few months later to dedicate the national cemetery, he had an important task: "to explain to the people," writes Borritt, in plain, powerful prose, "why the bloodletting must go on." After vividly recreating the delivery of the address, Boritt discusses the speech's mixed reception. Republican newspapers praised it; Democrats, viewing it as the beginning of Lincoln's re-election campaign, belittled or tried to ignore it; one Democratic newspaper called the speech a "mawkish harangue." Just as bad, Lincoln's graceful oratory was garbled in transmission to newspapers. Most interesting is Boritt's recounting of how, after Lincoln's assassination, the speech was mostly forgotten until the 1880s, when Gettysburg increasingly became a symbol of a reunion between North and South, and the Gettysburg Address took on the sheen of America's "sacred scriptures." Lincoln's poetic language, says Boritt, helps the speech live on, and the message of "sacrificial redemption" still speaks to Americans today. This elegant account will delight readers who enjoyed Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg. (Lengthy appendixes parsing drafts of the speech, however, will interest mainly aficionados.) 16 pages of b&w illus., and b&w illus. throughout. (Nov. 19) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Boritt (Civil War studies, Gettysburg Coll.) manages to offer a fresh perspective on one of America's most famous speeches-which was not the main event at the cemetery dedication at Gettysburg in November 1863, four months after the battle-even though it has already been studied extensively. The author sets the speech in its contemporary context and, most interestingly, demonstrates that it was not only minimally noticed by Lincoln's peers and the press at the time but was virtually forgotten to history until the 20th century. He addresses many of the myths surrounding the address, such as that Lincoln wrote it in haste on the train to Gettysburg. In fact, it went through a number of careful revisions. He includes images of the known copies of the handwritten address, broadsides and programs relating to the dedication ceremony at Gettysburg, selections of photos from the era, and a line-by-line analysis of the various drafts of the address. Boritt's narrative style will appeal to lay readers, perhaps more so than Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, while his extensive research and insightful conclusions will appeal to scholars. Recommended especially for libraries with a special interest in Lincoln and Civil War history.-Robert Flatley, Kutztown Univ., PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
Preface 1After Battle 5
Rebirth 31
Lincoln Comes to Gettysburg 49
Carousing Crowds 69
The Gettysburg Gospel 91
Echoes 130
Gloria 163
Coda 204
Appendixes 207
The Program at the Soldiers' National Cemetery, November 19, 1863 207
A Beautiful Hand: Facsimiles of the Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's Hand 245
Parsing Lincoln 256
Dollar Signs 287
Notes 293
A Bibliographic Note: Dwarfs and Giants 377
Acknowledgments 394
Index 403
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