Rating: 
Summary: The Cambodian Tragedy Through The Eyes Of a Child
Review: The story initiates with Loung Ung's memories of her semi-privileged childhood in Phnom phen. She goes on to describe the forced evacuation of the city by the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent placement of her family in an agricultural commune. The story is dominated by tales of starvation and death, but the reader is granted a reprieve when, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Loung immigrates to the US as a refugee. The numbers are something like 2,000,000 million dead or 1/5th of the Cambodian population.......too much for the brain to comprehend. We want to believe that genocide and mass tragedy in far away lands happen to a people that are used to hardship and therefore feel less pain. Loung's book rips away the false sense of comfort and exposes the horror we desperately want not to believe. Loung's way is perhaps the best way to relate this story. A child does not know politics or history. It only knows that mommy was here and now she is dead. Death is death, hunger is hunger and the reasons matter little to a 5 year old girl. Loung does not tell the reader why she is starving or why her father is killed, becuase as a child she has no idea. Pol Pot died a free man in China a few years ago. What did he think of the consequences of his failed political experiment? We may never know and this book does not have the answer. It is a tale of a tragedy through the eyes of innocence. I highly recommend this book to adults and children. For children I also recommend 'The Road From Home' by David Kherdian....a tale of the Armenian genocide.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Amazing
Review: The first time I read this book was in our Language Arts class. After reading it, I fell in love with this book as I learned of the terrible things that happened to her. Everyone in our school loved this book.... much to our pleasure we got to meet Loung Ung because she visited our school. She explained to us about landmines, and what happened to her, she told us that she first wrote this book as a diary in her teenage years and then made it into a book. She was funny when she needed to be but knew when to be serious. Overall this is a great book with a great author attached to it. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Quick read with maximum impact
Review: Ung writes with an eminently readable style. She covers events as they occurred, through her own eyes as a child. This means that the events are much more poignant, but a reader not familiar with recent Cambodian history will probably need an additional book to figure out what the wider political events actually were. For a reader unfamiliar with the atrocities committed by Third World authoritarian governments, this book, I'm sure, will be more more shocking and sad than for a reader well-versed in recent Southeast Asian politics. There is only one thing that this book left out of its coverage, and I wonder if it would help explain the "pigmentocracy" Ung discusses at various points in her book (e.g., being spit at/generally mistreated because she has light skin). In many Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia--and to some extent Cambodia as well--ethnic Chinese are an economically dominant minority. A few ethnic Chinese are much better off than legions of ethnic Khmer (/Thai/Indonesian/Malay/etc.), and often Chinese in such countries opt out of the national culture, choosing to retain Chinese traditions. Ung herself points out that her grandmother, who lived in Cambodia, never learned Khmer. Therefore, many Khmer would have had a deep dissatisfaction with Khmer/Chinese relative positions in society, and would have taken every advantage of the downfall of any ethnic Chinese in Cambodia by mistreating them the way Ung was mistreated. I think Ung should have included a foreword about this situation so that the reader could better understand the context in which the abuse based on her skin tone occurred.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive account of brutal times.
Review: This book retraces the horrific few years of a Cambodian family's struggle to survive Pol Pot's repressive regime. It is told through a young girl's eyes and is written in a simple manner. It is quite a riveting read and don't be surprised to find yourself wanting to extract these people from the situation they are in. You get to know the entire family of seven children and their parents so well, they feel like they are part of yours. And even though this is the story of one family, so many others are similar.
Whether you know much of the history of Cambodia or not, you should read this book because this history should be part of everyone's education. It may not prevent other similar situations (as we have witnessed since then), but one can always hope...
Rating: 
Summary: First They Killed My Father
Review: First They Killed My Father is a true story told through the eyes of the author, Loung Ung. This is a story of horror, survival, hope and family love. The author shows her strength and courage on every page of the book and introduces her family to the reader so much that you feel like you know them.
Ung's story chronicles her young life as a child during war, when the Khmer Rouge took over the Cambodian government and decided to create its own society. The story begins in the 1975 comfortable setting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where Ung's family lived through the turbulent evacuation from her home, separation and loss of her family, the struggle for survival and the reality of genocide.
I would highly recommend this book. It was easy to read, follow and understand. The book was not only educational, but also personal. The authentic family photographs in the middle of the book gave the me faces to go along with Ung's incredible story. This was very interesting to me. The epilogue was also worthwhile. It gave closure to the story and let the reader know what happened to the surviving family members.
Rating:
Summary: Genocide as seen through a child's eyes
Review: First They Killed My Father is genocide as seen through a child's eyes. Twenty years later, Cambodia's killing fields still cover unspeakable atrocities the world has not unearthed. This is one survivor's attempt to shed light on the pain she tried to bury there along with the dead. The strength and the weakness of this book rests in its style; the use of the present tense in a child's voice can fall flat at times. Nonetheless, the same voice can leave the reader stunned and near tears several pages later. As author Loung Ung reconstructs political conversations she claims she had with her beloved father at the age of five, it strikes the reader as totally contrived--as it obviously must be. Yet as she describes a child's fear spawned by war, terror, and the nightmares that follow her at all times, it becomes all too real to bear. Loung, now a beautiful American woman, becomes a tough little Cambodian girl again at those points. It seems almost a sacrilege to criticize any aspect of this compelling book, though, because it is such a powerful testament to the human spirit. On balance, the shortcomings that result from Loung's style are greatly outweighed by the power her narrative evokes. The guilt she suffers after she has eaten some of her family's scarce rice, for example, reveals a child's innate honesty and ability to grasp the ramifications of the simplest act. As pirates steal a jade Buddha, the last tangible link to Loung's murdered father, the reader feels the orphaned child's complete numbness. Loung's observations about her siblings' different personalities, and how these varied traits allowed some to survive the communist slaughter, probably are the strongest observations in the book. Loung concedes she cannot understand how such a sensitive person as her sister Chou lived amidst the ever-present threat of rape, murder, torture and starvation, and the reader grows to appreciate the beauty that terrible mystery represents. As reports emerge from North Korea and elsewhere about mass starvation and terror under the reigns of madmen, the reader can recall that two decades ago the same happened in Cambodia and the world stood mute as it would again and again in Rwanda, the Balkans, and too many places to name. Each new indignity against humanity makes the slogan "never again" ring a little more hollow, but as long as beautiful souls like Loung survive and chronicle what happened, the hope the phrase represents will endure.
Rating:
Summary: informed reader
Review: In this book, it follows the life of a victim of the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Beginning when she was in elementary school, it shows her many obstacles some of which many adults don't even face in their life times. With her father, her ethical support source, murdered, she struggles to blend in- and live to tell the tale. An important scene is when her foster mother told her she wouldn't amount to anything, and that she would probably end up a hooker. That inspired her to prove the foster mother wrong and be all that she could be. I liked it because it exposed the real terror that the Khmer Rouge withheld on the Cambodians, ad it didn't sugar-coat it. It was blunt and straight forward. I would recommend this to my peers because they can benefit from the lessons and morals brought up in the novel.I would recommend this novel to adults because you are never too old to learn new things. I would recommend this novel to schools because it is a good jumping off point for a lesson. While reading this, things to think about are: Things that you take for granted. If you had to leave your home in 15 minutes, what would you take? What you do can have an effect on millions of people
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is certainly an excellent piece of literature. First they killed my father is a wonderful but sad story about a girl that grew up in the Khemer Rouge genocide. Her name was Loung Ung, she is also the author of this book. She vivdly describes the incidents that occured there. You could almost feel every hunger pain and every tear. This book deserves 5 stars in my opinion because it took lots of courage discipline and perseverance to be able to even speak about such tragedy. She is an admirable person. I thank her for lettin me and the rest of ther world share her experiance.
Rating:
Summary: Book review for First they killed my father
Review: Author: Loung Ung Title: First They Killed My Father Summary: This book is about Lounge Ung and her family as they struggle through the war in Cambodian war. Loung loses some of her family member to the Khmer Rouge. She survives the war and so does some of her family. Important Scene: I think an important scene would be when Loung was on her own. Loung had to leave or was asked to leave by her mom so they don't killed all at once. This is an important scene because it shows how responsible she really was. To do all that traveling around and risking her own life must have taken a lot of effort. It was noted in the story on page 122 "Now go she turns around by the shoulder and bends down to give me a swat on my butt, pushing me away." This shows how she must go and live on her own ready for new life. Opinions: I liked the book a lot. Seeing that it was a true story it made me feel sad. I would have never thought some of things these happened were real. This book had so much detail and it was descriptive. I would recommend this book to my peers, adults, and to other schools. Why, because I would love for everyone to see that not everybody lived a good life. Things happen all across the world. Kids in other schools would love his book and I think anybody who reads it will. Ponder this: Three ideas would be
1. Think about all the families that lost there siblings and how sad that must be. Think about how scared they were to have there country as a battle field.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: This is a very good book. It touched the hearts of many of my classmates. If you ever get a chance to read it. I beg you to take the chance and get lost in it's wonders.
| 
