From a childhood survivor of the Camdodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.

Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered, yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir "A Lucky Child".

He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. "A Lucky Child" is a book that demands to be read by all.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

This clear and concise volume provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Hailed by the "Journal of Asian Studies" as an "original contribution, superior to any other existing work," the third edition of this acclaimed text has been completely revised and updated to include all-new material examining the death of Pol Pot and the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. In addition, Chandler examines the unstable but influential career of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the bloody reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, and the relative calm that followed the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. This comprehensive general description and analysis of Cambodia will illuminate—for specialists and general readers alike—the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.

A History of Cambodia

Philip Short observed Pol Pot at close quarters during the one and only official visit Pol ever made abroad, to China in 1975. He was struck by Pol Pot's charm and charisma, yet, soon after, the leader would emerge as the architect of one of the most radical and ruthless experiments in social engineering ever undertaken. His egalitarian utopia released a reign of terror that would result in one in every five Cambodians - more than a million people - perishing in the killing fields of from hunger.

Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice and prosperity mutate into one of humanity's worst nightmares? To answer these questions, Short traveled through Cambodia, interviewing former Khmer Rouge leaders and sifting through previously closed archives around the world. Key figures, including Khlen Samphan and Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's brother-in-law and foreign minister, speak here for the first time.

Philip Short's masterly narrative reveals how Pol Pot engineered his country's desolation, fashining the definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times.

(back cover)

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

"He became famous through his academy award-winning performance as Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields, but the key to Haing Ngor's screen success was the terrible truth of his own experiences in the rice paddies and labor camps of revolutionary Cambodia."

Here, in a gripping memoir of life under the communist Khmer Rouge regime, he reveals the country's descent into a hell beyond our imaginings: a world of war slaves and senseless brutality, where family life simply ceases to be. But with the pain he also gives us hope and an illuminating example of how the best sort of love can actually be strengthened through the shared experience of a life-threatening ordeal.

An eyewitness account of the real killing fields by an extraordinary survivor, this book is both a reminder of the horrors of war and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

A Cambodian Odyssey

Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker started covering Cambodia in 1973 for "The Washington Post", when the country was perceived as little more than a footnote to the Vietnam War. Then, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 came the closing of the border and a systematic reorganization of Cambodian society. Everyone was sent from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields. The intelligentsia were brutally exterminated, and torture, terror, and death became routine. Ultimately, almost two million people—nearly a quarter of the population—were killed in what was one of this century's worst crimes against humanity."When the War Was Over" is Elizabeth Becker's masterful account of the Cambodian nightmare. Encompassing the era of French colonialism and the revival of Cambodian nationalism; 1950s Paris, where Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot received his political education; the killing fields of Cambodia; government chambers in Washington, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh; and the death of Pol Pot in 1998; this is a book of epic vision and staggering power. Merging original historical research with the many voices of those who lived through the times and exclusive interviews with every Cambodian leader of the past quarter century, "When the War Was Over" illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning.

When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (Revised Edition)

In a mesmerizing story, Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields." She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, the members of Chanrithy's family remain loyal to one another, and she and her siblings who survive will find redeemed lives in America.


A Finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

A generation after the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia shows every sign of having overcome its history--the streets of Phnom Penh are paved; skyscrapers dot the skyline. But under this façade lies a country still haunted by its years of terror. Joel Brinkley won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime that killed one quarter of the nation's population during its years in power. In 1992, the world came together to help pull the small nation out of the mire. Cambodia became a United Nations protectorate--the first and only time the UN tried something so ambitious. What did the new, democratically-elected government do with this unprecedented gift?

In 2008 and 2009, Brinkley returned to Cambodia to find out. He discovered a population in the grip of a venal government. He learned that one-third to one-half of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have P.T.S.D.--and its afflictions are being passed to the next generation. His extensive close-up reporting in "Cambodia's Curse" illuminates the country, its people, and the deep historical roots of its modern-day behavior.

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. 

Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.

In the Shadow of the Banyan

The horrific torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during the 1970s is one of the century's major human disasters. David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name "S-21." The facility was an interrogation center where more than 14,000 "enemies" were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes. Fewer than a dozen prisoners left S-21 alive.

During the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) era, the existence of S-21 was known only to those inside it and a few high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials. When invading Vietnamese troops discovered the prison in 1979, murdered bodies lay strewn about and instruments of torture were still in place. An extensive archive containing photographs of victims, cadre notebooks, and DK publications was also found. Chandler utilizes evidence from the S-21 archive as well as materials that have surfaced elsewhere in Phnom Penh. He also interviews survivors of S-21 and former workers from the prison.

Documenting the violence and terror that took place within S-21 is only part of Chandler's story. Equally important is his attempt to understand what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and the rest of us. Chandler discusses the "culture of obedience" and its attendant dehumanization, citing parallels between the Khmer Rouge executions and the Moscow Show Trails of the 1930s, Nazi genocide, Indonesian massacres in 1965-66, the Argentine military's use of torture in the 1970s, and the recent mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda. In each of these instances, Chandler shows how turning victims into "others" in a manner that was systematically devaluing and racialist made it easier to mistreat and kill them. More than a chronicle of Khmer Rouge barbarism, "Voices from S-21" is also a judicious examination of the psychological dimensions of state-sponsored terrorism that conditions human beings to commit acts of unspeakable brutality.

Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison

Originally published in 1951, it is said that A Dragon Apparent inspired Graham Greene to go to Vietnam and write The Quiet American. Norman Lewis traveled in Indo-China during the precarious last years of the French colonial regime. Much of the charm and grandeur of the ancient native civilizations survived until the devastation of the Vietnam War. Lewis could still meet a King of Cambodia and an Emperor of Vietnam; in the hills he could stay in the spectacular longhouses of the highlanders; on the plains he could be enchanted by a people whom he found "gentle, tolerant and dedicated to the pleasures and satisfactions of a discriminating kind."

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, some two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Twenty years later, not one member had been held accountable for the genocide. Haunted by an image of one of them, Comrade Duch, photographer Nic Dunlop set out to bring him to life, and thereby to account. "I needed to understand how a movement that laid claim to a vision of a better world could instead produce a revolution of unparalleled ferocity; how a seemingly ordinary man from one of the poorer parts of Cambodia could turn into one of the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century:"Weaving seamlessly between past and present, Dunlop unfolds the history of Cambodia as a lens through which to understand its tragic last forty years. He makes clear how much responsibility the United States must share, through failed political alliances and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, for the bloodshed that followed. Guided by witnesses, Dunlop teases out the details of Duch's transformation from sensitive schoolchild and dedicated teacher to the revolutionary killer who later slipped quietly back into village life. From the temples of Angkor to the prisons of Pol Pot's regime, to his unexpected meeting with Duch himself, Dunlop's special vision as a photographer enlarges our own. The Lost Executioner is a blend of history and testimony-and a reminder that, whether in the killing fields of Cambodia or the deserts of Darfur, if we turn our backs on genocide, we must bear a collective guilt.

The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields

In Cambodia's recent, tragic past, no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. Yet information about his life and career is largely inaccessible. In this first book-length study of the man, the historian David P. Chandler casts light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot, illuminating the ideas and behavior of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history. In this revised edition, Chandler provides new information on the state of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge following the death of Pol Pot in 1997.

Brother Number One: A Political Biography Of Pol Pot

This is the way the world ends... for the last time.

The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, savior – has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.

It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.

The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.

The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

From the ever-intriguing and appealing actress Angelina Jolie comes the personal journals she compiled while performing humanitarian relief efforts in such countries as Sierra Leone and Tanzania, Pakistan and Cambodia.

Three years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily work, and candid notes from a unique pilgrimage that completely changed the actress's world view — and the world within herself.

Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan and Ecuador

This National Book Award nominee from two-time finalist Patricia McCormick is the unforgettable story of Arn Chorn-Pond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge.

Based on the true story of Cambodian advocate Arn Chorn-Pond, and authentically told from his point of view as a young boy, this is an achingly raw and powerful historical novel about a child of war who becomes a man of peace. It includes an author's note and acknowledgments from Arn Chorn-Pond himself.

When soldiers arrive in his hometown, Arn is just a normal little boy. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, his life is changed forever.

Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp: working in the rice paddies under a blazing sun, he sees the other children dying before his eyes. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. Arn's never played a note in his life, but he volunteers.

This decision will save his life, but it will pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields. And just as the country is about to be liberated, Arn is handed a gun and forced to become a soldier.

Never Fall Down

Jon Swain left Britain as a teenager, driven by his ambition to travel to far-away places, explore life on the borders of death, and escape from the straitjacket of a conventional and orderly English existence. After a brief stint with the French Foreign Legion he became a journalist in Paris, but soon ended up in Vietnam and Cambodia. So began an adventure and a love affair with the countries of former French Indo-China, to which he has been faithful ever since. Motivated by a sense of close involvement with the Cambodian people, he went back into Phnom Penh on the last plane just before the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Swain was captured and would have been executed had his life not been saved by Dith Pran, the New York Times interpreter, a story told by the critically acclaimed film The Killing Fields. Even to this day Swain feels that perhaps he should not be alive. The vigorous demands of a war correspondent and Swain's commitment to a pillaged country ran rampant over his personal life. A love affair with a French-Vietnamese girl ended in disillusion and disaster, leaving him with an overwhelming sense of personal failure. This memoir is one man's attempt to make peace with a tumultuous past, to come to terms with his memories of fear, pain, and death, and to say good-bye to the Indo-China he loved.

River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam

“Poignant … An unforgettable book.” 
- Elizabeth Becker, journalist and author of "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution" 
 
A man returns home to Cambodia whose people, unseen by the outside world and unknown to him, are dying in vast numbers in one of history’s bloodiest revolutions. He is never seen again. 
 
Back in France his disappearance in 1977 – during the near four-year period of catastrophe that survivors call “the time when the clouds fell from the sky” – marked the start of an unceasing search for answers by his wife Martine and their daughter Neary. 
 
It seemed an impossible task: 30-year-old diplomat Ouk Ket had vanished into the wasteland of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, a country whose population was enslaved and whose borders were closed. 
 
Decades later, though, Martine's and Neary's perseverance paid off when they testified at the war crimes trial of Comrade Duch, the chief of Pol Pot’s notorious S-21 prison where thousands of “enemies of the revolution” were tortured prior to their execution. 
 
In this book, spanning five decades and five lives, journalist Robert Carmichael takes the reader on a compelling journey into the causes and consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s savage rule during which two million people died, one in every four Cambodians. 
 
In describing one family’s experience, this book illuminates not just the tragedy of a nation but the fundamental limitations of international justice. 
 
Reviews: 
"Crisply written, elegantly constructed and thoroughly researched, When Clouds Fell from the Sky is a perceptive, often heart-breaking book.” 
− David Chandler, author of "Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison" 
 
“This is both the poignant story of a young woman seeking the truth about her father’s disappearance at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime, and an unflinching portrait of the executioner who oversaw the torture chamber where he was imprisoned. An unforgettable book.” 
− Elizabeth Becker, author of "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and The Khmer Rouge Revolution" 
 
“A beautifully written book that does a masterful job weaving the history of the Khmer Rouge tribunal with a more personal story of human tragedy and redemption. This extremely thoughtful work is the product of its author’s deep understanding of Cambodia. Anyone trying to make sense of the Khmer Rouge war crimes court should read this timely book.” 
− Peter Maguire, author of "Law and War", "Facing Death in Cambodia" and "Thai Stick" 
 
“Carmichael writes intelligently about a complicated subject that continues to haunt the survivors, be they Cambodians or anybody else from the myriad of foreign powers that dabbled in this country’s tragic history.” 
− The Diplomat magazine 


When Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Disappearance, A Daughter's Search and Cambodia's First War Criminal

A great deal is now known about the brilliant Khmer civilization that flourished among the monsoon forests and rice paddies of mainland Southeast Asia, thanks to the pioneering work of French scholars and the application of modern archaeological techniques such as remote sensing from the space shuttle.



The classic-period Khmer kings ruled over their part-Hindu and part-Buddhist empire from AD 802 for more than five centuries. This period saw the construction of many architectural masterpieces, including the huge capital city of Angkor, with the awe-inspiring Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious structure. Numerous other provincial centers, bound together by an impressive imperial road system, were scattered across the Cambodian Plain, northeast Thailand, southern Laos, and the Delta of southern Vietnam. Khmer civilization by no means disappeared with the gradual abandonment of Angkor that began in the fourteenth century, and the book's final chapter describes the conversion of the Khmer to a different kind of Buddhism, the move of the capital downriver to the Phnom Penh area, and the reorientation of the Khmer state to maritime trade.



"Angkor and the Khmer Civilization" presents a concise but complete picture of Khmer cultural history from the Stone Age until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1863, and is lavishly illustrated with maps, plans, drawings, and photographs. Drawing on the latest archaeological research, Michael D. Coe brings to life Angkor's extraordinary society and culture.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.In "Stay Alive, My Son", Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields.With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the New People, displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness.Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. Stay alive, my son, he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border.First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of "Stay Alive, My Son" includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin Yathay's message.

Stay Alive, My Son

This history of Cambodia from World War II up to the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 focuses on the devastating revolution that convulsed the country under Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, and the civil war that preceded it. David Chandler offers an analysis of the chaos during the 1970s and an understanding of events in the previous quartercentury. Drawing on vast quantities of primary material (including his own reports for the US embassy while a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh), on interviews, and on the scholarly literature, Chandler considers why the revolution happened, how it related to Cambodia's earlier history and to other events in southeast Asia, why it took the course it did, who was responsible for it, and to what extent its ideology drew on foreign rather than Cambodian elements.

The Tragedy Of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79

In this concise and compelling history, Cambodia’s past is described in vivid detail, from the richness of the Angkorean empire through the dark ages of the 18th and early-19th centuries, French colonialism, independence, the Vietnamese conflict, the Pol Pot regime, and its current incarnation as a troubled democracy. With energetic writing and passion for the subject, John Tully covers the full sweep of Cambodian history, explaining why this land of contrasts remains an interesting enigma to the international community. Detailing the depressing record of war, famine, and invasion that has threatened to destroy Cambodia, this discussion shows its survival to be a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. 


A Short History of Cambodia: From Empire to Survival

Concluding the trilogy that started with the bestselling memoir "First They Killed My Father", Loung Ung describes her college experience and her first steps into adulthood, revealing her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward towards happiness. After the violence of the Khmer Rouge and the difficult assimilation experience of a refugee, Loung’s daily struggle to keep darkness, anger, and depression at bay will finally find two unexpected allies: the empowering call of activism, and the redemptive power of love. "Lulu in the Sky "is the story of Loung’s journey to a Cambodian village to reconnect with her mother’s spirit; to a vocation that will literally allow her to heal the landscape of her birth; and to the transformative influence of a supportive marriage to a loving man.

Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness

"Alive in the Killing Fields" is the real-life memoir of Nawuth Keat, a man who survived the horrors of war-torn Cambodia. He has now broken a longtime silence in the hope that telling the truth about what happened to his people and his country will spare future generations from similar tragedy.

In this captivating memoir, a young Nawuth defies the odds and survives the invasion of his homeland by the Khmer Rouge. Under the brutal reign of the dictator Pol Pot, he loses his parents, young sister, and other members of his family. After his hometown of Salatrave was overrun, Nawuth and his remaining relatives are eventually captured and enslaved by Khmer Rouge fighters. They endure physical abuse, hunger, and inhumane living conditions. But through it all, their sense of family holds them together, giving them the strength to persevere through a time when any assertion of identity is punishable by death.

Nawuth’s story of survival and escape from the Killing Fields of Cambodia is also a message of hope; an inspiration to children whose worlds have been darkened by hardship and separation from loved ones. This story provides a timeless lesson in the value of human dignity and freedom for readers of all ages.

Alive in the Killing Fields: The True Story of Nawuth Keat, a Khmer Rouge Survivor

After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he’s still in good health. A big celebration is in the works for his 100th birthday, but Allan really isn’t interested (and he’d like a bit more control over his alcohol consumption), so he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey. It would be the adventure of a lifetime for anyone else, but Allan has a larger-than-life backstory: he has not only witnessed some of the most important events of the 20th century, but actually played a key role in them. Quirky and utterly unique, "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" has charmed readers across the world.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1)

In the shadow of Angkor Wat archaeologists make an astonishing discovery: the memoir of Cambodia's greatest king, preserved on leaves of gold for centuries. When the treasure is stolen, two ordinary Cambodians, a young moto-boy and a middle-aged ex-Khmer Rouge, join forces to recover it. But the spectre of Cambodia's violent past threatens both their fragile relationship and the success of their quest.

The King's Last Song

This amazing book was written by California author Joan Criddle, who has done a remarkable job in simulating the words of a Cambodian-American, Silicon Valley computer programmer Teeda Butt Mam, the daughter of a Lon Nol minor government official. When Phnom Pehn fell, Teeda was fifteen years old and attending an English school in the city. As a pampered child of a well-to-do urban family, she was not prepared to endure the hardships and the horrors which she would soon be forced to experience.

Upon the defeat of the Lon Nol Khmer Republic, Pol Pot founded Democratic Kampuchea and launched the economic plan of his French-trained associate, Khieu Samphan, who held that land was the source of all wealth. Khieu spurned technological and industrial development. According to him, only agricultural abundance and high prices for agricultural products could create economic prosperity. He viewed the Cambodian peasant as a “natural man” whose knowledge of agriculture was a sufficient education for anyone if supplemented with an elementary knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic. He also believed that educated urbanites had been so corrupted by Western ideas and values that they were a “useless” entity in the economic body unless they could be successfully re-educated --brainwashed -- and transformed into ideologically correct peasants; otherwise, he believed they should be destroyed, not being any “loss” to the country. Khieu’s plan was designed to be put into effect with “ruthless force.” And it was.

As terrible, as horrible, as depressing as it is to learn how political and economic extremism can distort human perception and turn men into beasts, Teeda’s story is at the same time absorbing, edifying, and ennobling--even hopeful. She and her family are exemplars of human courage, determination, and resourcefulness. After four years spent in slave labor and another year in a frustrating attempt to escape with her family to the United States, their spirit of liberty was never crushed. If their destruction was “no loss” to the Khmer Rouge, their preservation has been a decided gain for the citizenry of the United States

To Destroy You is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family

To many in the West, the name Cambodia still conjures up indelible images of destruction and death, the legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the terror it inflicted in its attempt to create a communist utopia in the 1970s. Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in the capital city of Phnom Penh, now offers an eye-opening appraisal of modern-day Cambodia in the years following its emergence from bitter conflict and bloody upheaval.
  
 In the early 1990s, Cambodia became the focus of the UN’s first great post–Cold War nation-building project, with billions in international aid rolling in to support the fledgling democracy. But since the UN-supervised elections in 1993, the nation has slipped steadily backward into neo-authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen. Behind a mirage of democracy, ordinary people have few rights and corruption infuses virtually every facet of everyday life. In this lively and compelling study, the first of its kind, Strangio explores the present state of Cambodian society under Hun Sen’s leadership, painting a vivid portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile the promise of peace and democracy with a violent and tumultuous past.

Hun Sen’s Cambodia


  A political thriller set in 1950s Cambodia with echoes of Graham Greene and James Ellroy.
 Cambodia, 1955. The country is on the brink of a major change, with the first democratic elections just around the corner. In the midst of the frenzy, we meet Sar-a quiet, likeable man in his early thirties who is campaigning for the opposition, but secretly working for an armed Communist takeover. Many years later, he will become known to the world as Pol Pot. Now, Sar is thinking about Somaly, the woman he is engaged to be married to and wants to build a life with. The outcome of the election will determine whether they have a future together. With his personal and political life at stake, Sar has everything to lose when his political rival, vice premier Sary, also notices the beautiful Somaly, and takes up the struggle for her affection. And of course Somaly - young, bored, beautiful-has an agenda of her own. Over the course of thirty days, and against the backdrop of political power games, a love triangle unfolds in the sweltering summer heat, in an atmosphere tense with ambition. 'I wonder if I've ever read a debut novel as good ... as in the fiction of Marguerite Duras and Graham Greene the tension between Power and Eros is hard as steel in [this] brilliant novel.' "SR Kulturnytt" This is in the James Ellroy and Mario Vargas Llosa department! Peter Fröberg Idling's political thriller is the same kind of feverish sweat-stained fiction/non-fiction ... a fully developed piece and cannot but be one of the finest literary debuts in decades, at least.' "Boras Tidning" 'An exquisite portrayal of complex emotion, of how people are shaped and coerced by their context. Overwhelming.' "Arbetarbladet"

Song for an Approaching Storm

The great legacy of the ancient Khmer civilization, the temples of Angkor, cover an area of 77 square miles in central Cambodia. These monuments, built between the ninth and 15th centuries--the classic period of Khmer art--are unrivaled in architectural g

Angkor: An Introduction to the Temples

I 1978 rejser en svenske delegation til Pol Pots Demokratiske Kampuchea. De begejstres over, hvad de røde khmerers revolution har gjort for landet. De ser fabrikker, skoler, sygehuse i et land der har været tæppebombet af amerikanerne og truet af Vietnam. De røde khmerer står for folkets demokrati. Først senere bliver det klart for verden, at en fjerdedel af befolkningen er blevet dræbt under indførelse og bevarelse af Pol Pots styre. At folkets demokrati er basalt undertrykkende, kollektivismen så grundlæggende, at det at gøre noget individualistisk er lig med forræderi mod folket og straffes med henrettelse.

Den svenske delegation så kun få signaler på vanviddet blandt de begejstrede mennesker, de mødte undervejs. De havde lov til at standse når som helst og tale med hvem de ville. Der var ifølge selv de cambodjanere, der viste rundt under besøgene meget lidt, der vakte mistænksomhed – en sulten pige, forsvindinger blandt omgivelserne, drab på en amerikansk journalist. Men stadigt bevaredes troen på, at det var folkets revolution og at regimet havde folkets støtte. Til svenskernes forsvar skal siges, at også andre europæiske delegationer havde været på den samme ’rundvisning’, herunder en dansk delegation, der dog senere stillede spørgsmålstegn ved, hvad de havde set.

Romanen er inddelt i 262 nummererede afsnit – historie, fakta, nogle få gisninger, der til sammen danner et billede af hvad der skete, og hvad svenskerne oplevede.

Pol Pots Smil

Within two years of Cambodia's independence in 1953, King Norodom Sihanouk had abdicated and was embarking in an unprecedented public construction boom that would last a decade and a half before going bust in an American-backed coup in 1970.

The rapid urban and rural development that preceded Norodom Sihanouk's overthrow ranged from ambitious infrastructure projects to entirely new towns. Of the thousands of new buildings that mushroomed across the country, many stand out for their high standard and unique style--a remarkable blend of new building techniques and traditional Khmer designs that marked a decisive break from French colonial architecture.

The rise and fall of New Khmer Architecture over 17 years has no parallel in modern architectural history. This book describes how such outstanding work flourished in Southeast Asia's oldest kingdom until it was dragged into almost three decades of military dictatorship, genocide and civil war. Based on six years of research in Cambodia, France and Australia, the authors recount this extraordinary period of national development with fascinating and sometimes controversial details. They also identify dozens of architects, engineers and town planners from the fifties and sixties who left a distinctly Cambodian architectural heritage that is only now being recognized.

Building Cambodia: 'New Khmer Architecture' 1953-1970

Fleeing war-torn Cambodia in 1980, Dara, her mother, and her older brother find sanctuary in a refugee settlement on the Thailand border, but when fighting erupts, Dara finds herself separated from everyone and everything she loves.

The Clay Marble

Unbelievable feats of transportation are an everyday occurrence on the streets of Cambodia. Tuk tuks, cyclos, cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles transport loads that defy your wildest imagination. Photographers Hans Kemp and Conor Wall documented this unique street culture resulting in this amazing 144 page book loaded with incredible photographs that will forever change your definition of “packed.”

Carrying Cambodia

Sundara fled Cambodia with her aunt's family to escape the Khmer Rouge army when she was thirteen, leaving behind her parents, her brother and sister, and the boy she had loved since she was a child.

Now, four years later, she struggles to fit in at her Oregon high school and to be "a good Cambodian girl" at home. A good Cambodian girl never dates; she waits for her family to arrange her marriage to a Cambodian boy. Yet Sundara and Jonathan, an extraordinary American boy, are powerfully drawn to each other. Haunted by grief for her lost family and for the life left behind, Sundara longs to be with him. At the same time she wonders, Are her hopes for happiness and new life in America disloyal to her past and her people?

Children of the River

Chloe Saunders is fifteen and would love to be normal. Unfortunately, Chloe happens to be a genetically engineered necromancer who can raise the dead without even trying. She and her equally gifted (or should that be 'cursed'?) friends are now running for their lives from the evil corporation that created them.

As if that's not enough, Chloe is struggling with her feelings for Simon, a sweet-tempered sorcerer, and his brother Derek, a not so sweet-tempered werewolf. And she has a horrible feeling she's leaning towards the werewolf...

Definitely not normal.

The Reckoning (Darkest Powers, #3)

Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.

Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, "The Road of Lost Innocence" recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change.

The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine

From the novelist the "New York Times" compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense

Adrift in Cambodia and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher, 28-year-old Englishman Robert Grieve decides to go missing. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future.

And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events-- involving a bag of “jinxed” money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler taxi driver, and a rich doctor’s daughter-- that changes Robert’s life forever.

"Hunters in the Dark" is a sophisticated game of cat and mouse redolent of the nightmares of Patricia Highsmith, where identities are blurred, greed trumps kindness, and karma is ruthless. Filled with Hitchcockian twists and turns, suffused with the steamy heat and pervasive superstition of the Cambodian jungle, and unafraid to confront difficult questions about the machinations of fate, this is a masterful novel that confirms Lawrence Osborne’s reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.

Hunters in the Dark

"Five Stars. Outstanding, A definite must read... a powerful book"-Tracy Eastgate, Under The Covers Reviews, 1998 (one of many from readers and critics around the world). Personal e-mail to the author, from Ms. Eastgate: "I want to pay you a compliment. Rarely does a book EVER get under my skin or in my subconcious enough to cause dreams of any sort, but I'll tell you what, by time this morning came, I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to sleep or not ... lol ... I actually had mild nightmares last night ... I love it!!!! ... this is an absolutely awesome book." Zo� Calla, 28, is bright, attractive, happy-go-lucky, and ambitious-but struggling with a ton of radioactive karma. She wants to be the next hot-shot news reporter in the small California coastal town of San Tomas. Her elderly mother is seeing alien ghosts, her young son Max may have bone cancer, a sinister but seductive detective named Vic Lara seems to read Zo�'s mind, and handsome zoo curator Roger Chatfield is widowed and available (with a few strings attached).Can Zo� Calla save the world? Will her mother forgive her? Will her soul mate be Roger or Vic? Will Dr. Boutros save Max? Will her ex-husband, the late, violent biker and murderer, Frank, stay dead? Can she get on with life? What happens next? Read the story of Zo� Calla to find out the answers.A primordial invasion fleet from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud lies sleeping at the bottom of the sea off San Tomas-and its pilot-avatar has begun communicating with Zo� by means of a Cold Thing that lives in a metaphoric pool at the back of her brain.When it rains, it pours. Sinister Detective Vic Lara starts circling around like a shark in the sea--and Zo� starts to realize that not only does he have a dark, overpowering romantic (dangerous) hold on her, but he knows the truth about her terrifying past, a life so horrible that she has blocked everything out.Will she continue to be drawn into the orbit of Det. Vic Lara, or will she instead gravitate toward the handsome, enigmatic zoo curator. Dr. Roger Chatfield is a widower with two children that Max befriended at school-stunning Elisa, 13, and boisterous Rudy, 9. She doesn't trust Chatfield. He is part of the conspiratorial Burtongale family. What does he know about the six dead employees and visitors at the zoo, and who's next?As Zo� would tell it, maybe her life is best summed up by the story of her modeling job. She was called to audition, and told she was beautiful-but alas, a foot too short and ten pounds too 'full.' However, they would be delighted to call her to model her gorgeous eyes, hands, feet, teeth, even her golden curly hair. And then nobody ever called.This novel was written in 1990, and published online in 1996 as an HTML novel by the author (John T. Cullen, writing SFFH as John Argo). He adopted the pseudonym Argo as a tribute to the early age of Web publishing wonder, before the arrival of crime and heartbreak, when the Internet was still as new and pure and exciting as untrodden snow. Argo was the Ship of Wonder on which Jason and the Argonauts ("Argo-sailors") went in search of the Golden Fleece during the Bronze Age, over 3,000 years ago when the Pontic and Aegean Seas were the mythological outer space of their age.John Argo (John T. Cullen), a Web and digital publishing pioneer, in April 1996 became the first to publish a proprietary, entire novel online (his suspense thriller Neon Blue). Weeks later (on July 4 1996), he launched Heartbreaker (this novel) which was retitled This Shoal of Space in 1998, and later published as Woman in the Sea and more recently as Starlight Deep Within a Gothic Sea. The cover image of a woman swimming in both a sea and amid starlight has been with the story since about 1998.

Starlight Deep Within a Gothic Sea (a Science Fiction Novel): Phantoms & Ghost Music in the Key of Borges (Virtual Reality)

Marcus aka “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, his injured best friend Darryl does not come out. The city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: "M1k3y" will take down the DHS himself.

Cambodia

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Loung Ung

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

Thomas Buergenthal

A History of Cambodia

David P. Chandler

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Philip Short

A Cambodian Odyssey

Haing Ngor

When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (Revised Edition)

Elizabeth Becker

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

Chanrithy Him

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

Joel Brinkley

In the Shadow of the Banyan

Vaddey Ratner

When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (Revised Edition)

Elizabeth Becker

Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison

David P. Chandler

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam

Norman Lewis

The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields

Nic Dunlop

Brother Number One: A Political Biography Of Pol Pot

David P. Chandler

The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

N.K. Jemisin

Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan and Ecuador

Angelina Jolie

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Loung Ung

Never Fall Down

Patricia McCormick

River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam

Jon Swain

When Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Disappearance, A Daughter's Search and Cambodia's First War Criminal

Robert Carmichael

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization

Michael D. Coe

Stay Alive, My Son

Pin Yathay

The Tragedy Of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945

David P. Chandler

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79

Ben Kiernan

A Short History of Cambodia: From Empire to Survival

John A. Tully

Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness

Loung Ung

Alive in the Killing Fields: The True Story of Nawuth Keat, a Khmer Rouge Survivor

Nawuth Keat

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1)

Jonas Jonasson

The King's Last Song

Geoff Ryman

To Destroy You is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family

Joan D. Criddle

Hun Sen’s Cambodia

Sebastian Strangio

Song for an Approaching Storm

Peter Fröberg Idling

Angkor: An Introduction to the Temples

Dawn F. Rooney

Pol Pots Smil

Peter Fröberg Idling

Building Cambodia: 'New Khmer Architecture' 1953-1970

Helen Grant Ross

The Clay Marble

Minfong Ho

Carrying Cambodia

Hans Kemp

Children of the River

Linda Crew

The Reckoning (Darkest Powers, #3)

Kelley Armstrong

The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine