Brother One Cell by Thomas, Cullen

Low stock: 3 left

196mm x 129mm x 24mm

Pages: 416

Product Description


Cullen Thomas was just like the thousands of other American kids who travel abroad after college. He was hungry for meaning and excitement beyond a nine-to-five routine, so he set off for Seoul, South Korea, to teach English and look for adventure. What he got was a three-and-a- half-year drug-crime sentence in South Koreas prisons, where the physical toll of life in a cell was coupled with the mental anguish of maintaining sanity in a world that couldnt have been more foreign. This is Thomass unvarnished account of his eye-opening, ultimately life-affirming experience.
Brother One Cell is part cautionary tale, part prison memoir, and part insightful travelogue that will appeal to a wide readership, from concerned parents to armchair adventurers.


From Publishers Weekly


In May 1994, Thomas, a slacker vagabond teaching English, was arrested in Seoul, South Korea, for smuggling hashish into the country. He served three and a half years in various prisons and was released in 1997. In this strangely uneventful memoir, Thomas recounts his trials and tribulations in flat, unmodulated prose. Using an unnecessarily complicated flashback style at the beginning, Thomas presents himself as an innocent abroadGÇöa symbol of the legions of disaffected middle-class youth wandering the globe aimlessly looking for, well, they dont really know. While teaching English to Korean children, Thomas falls in with an unsavory lot and heads to the Philippines for a drug deal. This goes awry, and he lands in prison, where he meets and befriends various other foreigners. One prison is like a U.N. of convicted losers. Most troubling is that while Thomas gives the reader plenty of detail and keeps the story moving forward well enough, he seems little affected by the experience. It is as though, as a relatively privileged American, Thomas is so stunned by being forced to serve his full term for his crime that he is unable or unwilling to be humbled by the experience.
(Mar.)
Copyright -¬ Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


About the Author


Cullen Thomass writing has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, Salon, and
Penthouse, among other publications. This is his first book.


From Booklist


*Starred Review* In 1994, Thomas was a bright young man just out of college, looking to satisfy his wanderlust by teaching English in South Korea. His taste for adventure was formed in early childhood when he and his brother invented an imaginary character named the Jolly Marauder, a pirate-nobleman with a fearless heart and a take-no-prisoners attitude. Thomas claimed the Jolly Marauder as his life model, which influenced his decisions to accept the teaching job in Seoul, work there illegally without a contract, and buy a cheap kilo of hashish in the Philippines to sell back in Seoul for a cool 10 grand. The fantasy ended, however, when Thomas was caught by the police and sentenced to three and a half years in a South Korean prison. In his memoir, Thomas explains how that time of incarceration represented his real education. Surprisingly, he found little brutality (no rape) in Koreas penal institutions, but there were language barriers, unfamiliar foreign customs, extreme codes of social hierarchy, and almost no individual freedoms. He had to overcome all of this, as well as his own personal demons, to get to a place of higher understanding--something that, amazingly, he seemed to accomplish. His account of that journey is gripping.
Jerry Eberle

Copyright -¬ American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review



Brother One Cell is Mr. Thomass affecting account of his prison experience. Its an offbeat coming of age story, the tale of a wide-eyed, innocent, middle-class American thrust into a world of deprivation and daily trials