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Three Came Home | 
 enlarge | Author: Agnes Newton Keith
Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: $20.65
Buy New: $14.53
You Save: $6.12 (30%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 719304
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0907871283
Dewey Decimal Number: 355
EAN: 9780907871286
ASIN: 0907871283
Publication Date: October 30, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Great read, good companion piece to the film May 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
After seeing the 1950 Claudette Colbert film version of this book, I was interested in reading the memoir on which the film was based. Agnes Keith was married to a British government officer when the Japanese took Indonesia during the early days of World War II. Keith and her toddler son were taken to a POW camp; her husband spent the rest of the war in a men's camp under even worse conditions. Keith's memoir describes the starvation, the cruelty, the inhumane conditions, disease, torture, hard labor and the women's superhuman struggles to keep their children alive and relatively healthy. The story is not only about survival, but about the power of love. In the book an occasional racist remark, typical of the times, creeps in, but she also occasionally inserts insights into the humanity found even in some of her captors, and certainly in the Indonesian people. The book ends with little bitterness, and primarily a plea for peace. The film was remarkably faithful to the book, sanitizing and softening some details because film audiences weren't expected to see Claudette Colbert fighting rats, living in abject filth, or dropping down to 80 pounds. The film is still very powerful; the book even more so. This is a well-bound trade paperback edition.
 Excellent Book May 4, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of the best written book I have ever read. Very emotional A DEFINATE MUST READ BOOK
Powerful December 8, 2005
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book contains the wartime memoirs of Agnes Keith. In 1939, Keith published a book "Land Beneath the Wind," describing her life as the wife of a British colonial official in Northern Borneo. She and her husband Harry were on home leave in North America in 1939 when she finished writing the book. However, Harry was called back early to Borneo from his leave because of the war clouds on the horizon. Agnes, who was pregnant, soon followed, and several months later, gave birth to their son George in Sandakan. Although there had been talk of evacuating women and children from colonial outposts in the Pacific, no orders came through for evacuation before the Japanese invasion, and Agnes refused to leave Harry behind voluntarily. Thus, when the Japanese arrived, all three Keiths were still in Sandakan, and were soon interned in prisoners' camps for the duration of the war. In this book, Keith recounts the stories of how she, George, and Harry survived life in the camps. Her tale was so remarkable that it was made into a movie shortly after the war.
Readers of Keith's earlier book will be stunned at the change in tone of her writing. In Land Beneath the Wind, Keith writes with an airy, scattered-brained style, almost as if she were afraid that otherwise, she would be taken too seriously. Indeed, it was perhaps her humor itself that made her first book popular. But the light tone is gone completely from this book. The nightmare of the prison camps, where random beatings were a certainty, but food was often unattainable, and hygiene nonexistent, took away her carefree nature and matured her overnight beyond her years. For more than three years, she struggled daily to find any kind of food for George, from wormy rice to just plain worms. This woman of colonial privilege traded family heirloom jewelry for a chicken, and learned to hoard night soil for use as fertilizer.
From the start, the Japanese camp leader recognized her as a special prisoner, because he had read Land Beneath the Wind. He required her to keep a journal of her camp adventures for future publication to show how "humane" the Japanese treatment of prisoners had been. So every day, after she completed her required prison work, she had to write for this commander about how wonderful camp life was. When that was finished, she secretly wrote up notes describing what life was really like, and hid them in cans buried under their huts or in the latrines. The most amazing part of her experience is not only that she and George and Harry survived at all, but that through it all, she managed to come away from the camps without blind hatred for the Japanese. She recognized that some of the prison guards were evil, but that many couldn't help but obey their superiors. The years of captivity for the Keiths robbed them of their youth, their health, and the better part of George's childhood, but Agnes finds fault not with Japanese people, but rather with the idea of war itself.
Memorable Story February 20, 2002
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Three Came Home is a well-written, true story of a woman and her son's internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Borneo during WWII. Agnes Newton Keith creates a vivid portrait of the conditions under which the prisoners lived and of their day to day lives. She also makes it clear that people are not inherently good or bad; they are often victims of circumstances. Her love for her son and hope that they will be reunited with her husband keep her going and morally-centred. An absolutely excellent book!
An Emotional Account of Internment September 21, 2001
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
As much as "Three Came Home" is a story of war, it is a story of love. Mrs. Keith's love for her husband and son are paralleled with her hatred of internment. She balances the good in people, even the enemy, with the bad. The clear message is that war is what makes people bad. I enjoyed this book. It is beautifully written, with every sentence eliciting some kind of emotion in the reader. Mrs. Keith is an admirable woman for her literary accomplishments and her ability to share her experiences on a very personal level.
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