Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood
reviewed on + 3 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


I read this book for my freshman english class in college and I loved it. This has got to be one of the best books I've ever read and I would reccomend it to everyone. The one suggestion I have when reading this book is to keep a box of Kleenex nearby.

From Amazon:

"Book Description
Kien Nguyen grew up an outsider in his native land. His once prosperous family, thrust into poverty at the dawn of a new political regime, lived among neighbors who treated them as an unwelcome remnant of the colonialist past. Kien himself, a child of mixed race (his father was American), was among the most unwanted.
Told with a stark, poetic brilliance, Kien's account of his early years-from the fall of Saigon, when at age eight he watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him and his family, to his eventual escape-is a work of profound emotional resonance, at once harrowing and inspiring. The Unwanted unforgettably records a universal human experience played out in extreme circumstances: the forging of an identity, a life."