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Book Reviews281 The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Chüdhood, 1975-1980, by Molyda Syzmusiak. Indiana University Press (paperback reprint), 1999. 245 pages, $12.95. At twelve, Syzmusiak was the oldest of these three memoirists when the Khmer Rouge embarked on its brutal political experiment, which lasted five years. She first published her story in French in 1984, just four years after her emigration from Cambodia to Europe. (Syzmusiak changed her given name, Buth Keo, after her adoption by European parents.) This chronological proximity to her experience may account for the astonishingly rich detail and specificity in this book. Since she was a teenager during her half-decade under the Khmer Rouge, her scope was broader, with an ear toward the irony of the revolutionary rhetoric. "We're here to save you," she recalled the soldiers announcing as they marched into Phnom Phen.Yet in spite ofSyzmusiak's more mature outlook, the reader never forgets that he or she is listening to the voice of a young girl: Alone in the boat, after the Mekong had gotten out when we passed near the village, I thought about Phnom Phen. Barely four and a half months have gone by, and it seems so long ago! Here there's nothing but silence. Oh, if only I could hear music again! It's been so long since I've heard any music. IfI could just have some cake! And see the lights of the city again, the lights of our old house ... A piece ofbread! . . . And chocolate. Oh, a piece of chocolate. And also a pencil for writing. And a book! I had been about to start seventh grade. I'd like to read a bit, to study. But there's nothing .. . In aU three memoirs, it is the children who must speak of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. None of their parents survived. Joe Mackall Lately I find myselfapproaching works ofcreative nonfiction the way I once spent long and long ago summer afternoons with boyhood friends. "I'U meet you at your house," I'd say. "But then let's go somewhere."And go we did, or at least it seemed so then. I met the foUowing three writers at the front covers and first pages of their books, and then we went somewhere. One writer took me into the quirky and inteUigent character and memory of an essayist who calls his father "Daddy." I accompanied another writer 282Fourth Genre into the disturbing attic of present-day Civil War fanatics, and a third took me along on ajourney, a white man'sjourney into blackAmerica. The three books I'm recommending each deliver on a wild ride. Billy Watson's Croker Sack, by Franklin Burroughs. University of Georgia Press (paperback), 1998. 149 pages, $15.95. Franklin Burroughs grew up in South Carolina and now teaches at Bowdoin CoUege in Maine; his essays evoke WiUiam Faulkner's South and E. B.White's farm. But Burroughs s style is distinctly his own: always elegant, sometimes simple, plainly honest, and, perhaps most of aU, completely authentic. In these days of some readers' growing suspicion about the veracity ofcreative nonfiction, Burroughs's work is utterly befievable. He's a writer who makes you lean into the page to listen, whether he's writing about his past, old men, snapping turtles, or the death of a dog namedJacob who " . . . looks at us with the hangdog look of apology, supplication, and fear," and whose tail wagging "... proclaims his dafly knowledge that he has outUved nature, and must trust to the uncertainties of our forbearance." Burroughs is the kind of essayist whose vision transcends time and place. For him victims of famine in Ethiopia merge with his children watching TV "My children gaze at children whose bellies are taut and round as the sweUing throats of the toads that triU around our doorstep each evening." He reminds me ofmy time as a child Ustening to older and wiser men and women teU stories. Not until I grew up and could put twenty or thirty years between me and the stories these elders told did I wonder at aU about whether I was being told the truth. There was...

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