Book
Alive in the Killing Fields
Alive in the Killing Fields: Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide is Nawuth Keat's memoir, written with Martha E. Kendall and published in 2009.[1][2] It tells how he survived the Khmer Rouge as a child and escaped through Thailand to the United States.[1][2]
About the book
Nawuth was the fifth of eight children in the village of Salatrave, where his father was a prosperous rice farmer.[1][3] He was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge reached the village.[3] When the Khmer Rouge attacked his family's village in 1973, soldiers shot his uncle and then opened fire on the family. His mother and his baby sister died, and Nawuth was shot three times.[4][5] In the account he gave the Hollister Free Lance in 2007, he then lived with his older sister in the city for two years, and when the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in 1975, the family went back to their village.[4]
The Khmer Rouge captured the family and forced them to work amid constant hunger and physical brutality.[3] In Keat's 2007 account, people were put in groups by age and worked from sunrise to sunset growing crops.[4] His father hid in the jungle from the Khmer Rouge for years. When they found him and brought him back to the village, Nawuth saw him for the last time.[4] By the winter of 1976 people around him were starving, and he fed his family with snakes, rats, frogs, fish and wild mushrooms from the jungle, although the punishment for finding food there was death.[4] Across these years he lost both parents, his younger sister and other relatives.[3]
When the Vietnamese army drove the Khmer Rouge out of the village, Nawuth and his family walked through the night with a large group to a town the Vietnamese held.[4] His brother-in-law hired a smuggler to take them across the border, and Nawuth spent three months in a refugee camp. His sister paid a woman in the camp to take him out of the country.[4] At 14 he moved with the woman to Salem, Oregon. He later left that household and lived with a great-aunt in Oregon City.[4] In 2007 his sister and brother-in-law were living in France, and two of his brothers had recently moved to the United States.[4]
The book is written for readers ages 12 and up.[6] I'm Your Neighbor Books lists it as an own-voices account set in Cambodia and Thailand, with themes of lost childhood, the refugee journey, trauma and healing.[7]
Publication and editions
National Geographic published the book in Washington, D.C., in 2009.[2] Penguin Random House gives the publication date as October 13, 2009, and Kirkus Reviews gives October 1, 2009.[6][3] It has 128 pages and a Lexile reading level of 750L.[6] Hardcover and ebook editions exist.[7]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews reviewed the book in its September 1, 2009, issue, noting Nawuth's resourcefulness in keeping his surviving family alive.[3] Children's Literature called it a powerful story that could widen readers' understanding of the human capacity for good and evil.[7]
Access
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Wikipedia
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Stark Library catalog record
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Kirkus Reviews, Alive in the Killing Fields
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 Hollister Free Lance, Jessica Ablamsky, Harrowing tale ends in good life (November 16, 2007)
- ↑ The Roar, San José City College, San José City College Centennial: Martha Kendall (March 5, 2021)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Penguin Random House
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 I'm Your Neighbor Books, Alive in the Killing Fields