Unshelved Week: Brother One Cell
October 29th, 2007 by Laura Moncur in Literature
Growing up is hard to do, but doing it in prison is a story worth reading about in Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons by Cullen Thomas:
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. 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.
The true story of an American in a Korean prison. Does Cullen Thomas take responsibility for his actions and serve his prison term with honor?