Books like First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Maya Angelou's autobiography, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings', tells the story of her life and the challenges she faced growing up in Arkansas, including racism, abuse, and the loss of her father. The book is a powerful and moving portrayal of the African American experience during the 1930s and 1940s.

Elie Wiesel's autobiographical memoir chronicles his childhood in a Hungarian ghetto and his harrowing survival in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, exploring the horrors of the Holocaust and its lasting moral impact.

A candid memoir of Lori Gottlieb’s teenage battle with anorexia nervosa, revisiting her 1970s diary to reveal the loneliness, family dynamics, and societal pressures that drove her dieting obsession.

A memoir of a boy raised among the Turbans of the Dominican Republic, whose fierce love for his sister and quest for meaning culminate in a walk to the purported miracles of Jesus Land.

A memoir of Walter Dean Myers’s upbringing in Harlem’s 1940s and 1950s, detailing his struggles with anger, poverty, and schooling as he grows toward a writing career.

"From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor's autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Rithy Panh was only eleven years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who's neither an ordinary person nor a demon--he's an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil. The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel's Night"--

June Jordan’s memoir traces a gifted African‑American girl’s childhood in Harlem and Brooklyn, exploring how her immigrant parents’ sacrifices and her own artistic drive shaped her identity as a poet and social activist.

Chanrithy Him’s memoir traces her family’s survival through Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge terror, the violence of the Vietnam war, and their eventual escape to the United States.

This extraordinary book contains eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors who were children at the time. The memoirs were gathered by Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically portrayed in the film The Killing Fields. These testimonies bear shattering witness to the slaughter committed by the Khmer Rouge. The contributors - most of them now living in the United States and pictured in photographs that accompany their stories - report on life in Democratic Kampuchea as seen through children's eyes. They speak of their bewilderment and pain as Khmer Rouge cadres tore their families apart, subjected them to brainwashing, drove them from their homes to work in forced-labor camps, and executed captives in front of them. Their stories tell of suffering, the loss of innocence, the struggle to survive against all odds, and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

A heartfelt young‑adult narrative that follows a Cherokee boy’s growth, weaving family ties, cultural tradition, and personal discovery against a historical backdrop of North American Indians.

"When Loung Ung came to America in 1980 as a ten-year-old Cambodian refugee, she had already survived years of hunger, violence, and loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a story she told in her bestseller, First They Killed My Father. Now, in Lucky Child, Ung writes of assimilation and, in alternating chapters, gives voice to a genocide survivor she left behind in rural Cambodia, her older sister Chou." "Loung was the lucky child, the sibling Eldest Brother chose to take with him to America. The youngest and the scrappiest, she was the one he believed had the best chance of making it. Just two years apart, Chou and Loung had bonded deeply over the deaths of their parents and sisters. As they stood holding hands in their dusty village while the extended family gathered to say good-bye, they never imagined that fifteen years would pass before they would be reunited again." "Ung describes what it is like to survive in a new culture while surmounting dogged memories of genocide and the deep scars of war. Not only must she learn about Disney characters and Christmas trees to fit in with her classmates, she must also come to understand life in a nation of peace: that the Fourth of July fireworks are not bombs and that she doesn't have to hide food in her bed every night to make sure she has enough to eat." "An accomplished activist and writer, Ung has now returned to Cambodia many times, and in this recreation of Chou's life, she writes the story that so easily could have been hers. Both redemptive and searing, Lucky Child highlights the harsh realities of chance and circumstance and celebrates the indomitability of the human spirit."--BOOK JACKET.