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Title details for Brother One Cell by Cullen Thomas - Available

Brother One Cell

An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

by Cullen Thomas
Dan Woren
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Cullen Thomas had a typical suburban upbringing. He was raised on Long Island, and after graduating from college he was looking for meaning and excitement. Possessed of a youthful, romantic view of the world, he left New York at age twenty-three and set off for a job teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. As foreigners on the fringe of Korean society, Cullen and his friends felt intensely separate, then untouchable. That delusion was quickly shattered. Cullen would spend four years in the country: seven months teaching, then three and a half years in jail for smuggling hashish. BROTHER ONE CELL is his memoir of that time–the harrowing and powerful story of a young American learning hard lessons in strange prisons on the other side of the world.
One of few foreign inmates, Cullen shared a cell block with human traffickers, jewel smugglers, murderers, and thieves. Humbled by the ordeal, he describes his fight to restore his identity and to come to terms with the harsh living conditions and the rules of Korea’s strict Confucian culture, which were magnified in prison. In this crucible Cullen shed the naïveté and ego of youth and to his surprise achieved a lasting sense of freedom and gratitude. With its gritty descriptions of life behind high walls and acute insights into Korean society, BROTHER ONE CELL is part cautionary tale and part insightful travelogue about places few of us will ever see.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 20, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415937877
      • File size: 339023 KB
      • Duration: 11:46:17

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 18, 2006
      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 abroad—a symbol of the legions of disaffected middle-class youth wandering the globe aimlessly looking for, well, they don't 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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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