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tanklor1
Joined: 13 Jun 2006
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 Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 5:14 am Post subject: Brother One Cell by Cullen Thomas |
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| I picked this book up used earlier this week. I'm finding it an interesting read. Anyone else read it? What are your thoughts? |
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ttompatz
Joined: 05 Sep 2005
Location: Kwangju, South Korea
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 5:33 am Post subject: Re: Brother One Cell by Cullen Thomas |
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| tanklor1 wrote: |
| I picked this book up used earlier this week. I'm finding it an interesting read. Anyone else read it? What are your thoughts? |
Seen the video:
banged up abroad, 2008, season 3, Episode 8: South Korea
Cullen Thomas, working with his girlfriend "Rocket", is arrested trying to smuggle hashish from the Philippines to South Korea.
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detonate
Joined: 16 Dec 2011
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:07 am Post subject: |
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| He had a great plan to get fluent in Korean and stuck with it! Get thrown in Korean jail for being an idiot (as he admits) and stay there for years. You're bound to learn the language! Such dedication. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:08 am Post subject: |
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Read the book and saw the video.
Regarding the video, let's just say he leaves out a lot of details, one being that his stupidity got a perfectly innocent man who just happened to be at the post office at the same time as Cullen was apprehended and interrogated by the Korean police. That's just one of the things he leaves out; other things are not as "innocent". Yes, I know a video, especially one lasting a mere 30 or 60 minutes cannot even hope to be as informative as a book. My complaint is that Cullen glossed over quite a few things in that video, actually giving a distinctly different impression to the audience than one finds in the book.
Onto the book. I did find it a good read. There were a lot of details in there, including consequences of his criminal stupidity on friends, family, and even landlord. He describes very well Korea's investigative process (zap them until they confess, then have them sign a form saying they weren't zapped), life in the holding cells, Korean court procedure, and life in the prison. This was all before Korea decided to have a foreigners only prison or at a time when the foreign prisoners had a choice on going to the foreigners only prison or remaining in a Korean prison.
For either the video or the book, the important lesson to learn is don't be a selfish jackass. Also, don't ever smuggle drugs in another country. A few countries don't care if you're from America, Australia, or wherever; they'll still kill you for that crime.
If you get the opportunity, you should also read 4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison. That book's author has nowhere near the writing ability Cullen has and doesn't bother to actually accept what happened to him as his own fault. Cullen, on the other hand, wrote an informative story and, at least in the book, did not shy away from taking blame for his situation. |
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cdninkorea
Joined: 27 Jan 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:35 am Post subject: |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
| If you get the opportunity, you should also read 4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison. That book's author has nowhere near the writing ability Cullen has and doesn't bother to actually accept what happened to him as his own fault. Cullen, on the other hand, wrote an informative story and, at least in the book, did not shy away from taking blame for his situation. |
This makes it sound like it wasn't a good book. Is it worth reading in spite of the poor writing quality or have I misunderstood?
Anyway, I've read "Brother One Cell" and thought it was interesting to learn about his experience in a Korean prison. |
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World Traveler
Joined: 29 May 2009
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:51 am Post subject: |
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Book excerpts (via Goodreads):
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| �It was easy not to like the other foreigners. I wondered how I'd fallen in with such a band of freaks. There were so many odd, wandering types--a host of bent Australians, warped British, tainted Canadians, tormented runaway Americans. (I considered myself fairly well balanced among this cast, but then look what became of me.) I'd expected it to a certain degree, but I was still surprised. Most of them seemed like misfits. Only a few content. But all of us found teaching work with astounding ease. It didn't matter that, on the whole, we were ragged and suspect because the demand for English in Korea was so great that almost anyone was accepted.� |
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�Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.
This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.
We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.� |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:55 am Post subject: |
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| cdninkorea wrote: |
| CentralCali wrote: |
| If you get the opportunity, you should also read 4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison. That book's author has nowhere near the writing ability Cullen has and doesn't bother to actually accept what happened to him as his own fault. Cullen, on the other hand, wrote an informative story and, at least in the book, did not shy away from taking blame for his situation. |
This makes it sound like it wasn't a good book. Is it worth reading in spite of the poor writing quality or have I misunderstood? |
The book about the time in a Thai prison was informative, just not well-written and the author's attitude was not impressive. |
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World Traveler
Joined: 29 May 2009
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:58 am Post subject: |
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| Did you guys see the Locked Up Abroad episode about the English teacher in Thailand? That one was interesting. |
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rkc76sf
Joined: 02 Nov 2008
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 7:16 am Post subject: |
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| The two things I took away from his book were: don't bring drugs into a country as sealed-tight as Korea and there is no such thing as butt-love in a Korean prison. I felt bad about what happened to his Air Force friend, I won't say as it might ruin it for whoever is reading it, although I have no sympathy for the things he did that landed him in jail and if you think about it, no way in hell would he do that in America and get out after a few years ( at least not less than 10, which is about what he served in a Korean prison if my memory serves right) |
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Yaya
Joined: 25 Feb 2003
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 8:02 am Post subject: |
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| I hear he frequents Koreatown in New York because he is banned from entering Korea but hopes that the Korean government will lift that ban one day. |
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silkhighway
Joined: 24 Oct 2010
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 8:23 am Post subject: |
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| I thought Brother One Cell was going to be another cliche westerner locked up abroad by horrible foreign savages story, but I ended up liking it. It was as much a coming of age story as anything. |
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