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    Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
    Unavailable
    Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
    Unavailable
    Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
    Audiobook11 hours

    Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

    Written by Cullen Thomas

    Narrated by Dan Woren

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 20, 2007
    ISBN9781415937860
    Unavailable
    Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

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    Reviews for Brother One Cell

    3.5/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      “Brother One Cell” is a story of a 20-something American guy travelling to South Korea in early 1990s in order to teach English. He then ends up caught trafficking drugs into Seoul from the Philippines and is sent to prison for 3,5 years. It is basically a story of the hardship of confinement, especially one away from home, in a totally strange culture, and of the struggle to come to terms with one’s mistakes. In all fairness to him, he seems to come to appreciate this hard lesson in the end and mature because of it. The book gives an interesting insight into Korean culture and traditions as well as into their prisons system which, according to the author, seems to make more sense than a lot of western culture jails. All in all, it’s a well written interesting story, worth a read.
    • 4/5
      Brother One Cell is more foreigner-in-Korea depravity, albeit in a lower form. Instead of outright murder, it's just smuggling two kilos of hashish into the country from the Philippines. No biggie. Of course, it doesn't help Thomas' story that he is, by all available accounts, a certifiable douche bag. I can't say that he's a bad writer, because he isn't, but his story does come off as something you'd like to know about, so long as someone else tells it. "Locked Up Abroad" movie-fied his story for those wanting the short version.
    • 3/5
      Cullen Thomas was an aimless young man seeking adventure when he came to South Korea to teach English. In the 1990s, Seoul seemed to be a wide open city where anything--legal or illegal--was possible if you had enough gumption. Thomas's little foray into drug smuggling, however, got him not money, adventure, and hashish, but three and a half years in prison. In the miserable, but relatively safe Korean prison system, Thomas begins to rethink his life and eventually grows up. The memoir trails off in an unsatisfactory manner, but the portions of the book where Thomas describes the stratified South Korean society and the culture of the prison are very compellling.