Suggested Reading
Angkor: Cambodia's Fabulous Khmer Temples
-- One of the most comprehensive guides to the history and culture of Angkor Wat. Each monument is covered in intricate detail with well-drawn maps and photographs. There is also a wealth of background information of the temple complex.
Footprint Cambodia Handbook
-- The Footprint series are renowned for their attention to detail whilst keeping the reader engaged, and the Cambodian edition is no exception. The section on Angkor is particularly well written with easy to follow diagrams and history section.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
--This incredible eyewitness account of the Khmer Rouge’s barbaric 4 year reign of terror is vivid and at times shocking. The narrator, Loung Ong, was at the time a young girl.
Gecko Tails: A Journey through Cambodia
-- Carol Livingston’s account of her time in Cambodia is both funny and moving. Seen through the eyes of the UN, this travel book takes a different angle on the country and her people.
0813335116:Product Link on Barnes & Noble.com.
--A complete, scholarly and readable account of Cambodian history from the dawn of the Funan dynasty to the 1993 elections by David Chandler.
0813335108:Product Link on Barnes & Noble.com. -- Another David Chandler book, this one traces the rise to power of the infamous Pol Pot. Its main achievement is the ability to look behind the politics and ideology and get to the man who to this day remains something of an enigma.
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing up under the Khmer Rouge
-- Chanrithy Him’s own vivid recollection of her journey through the "killing fields". The book provides a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where families and society in general are ripped apart, where labor camps are the norm and modern technology no longer exists.
Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia
-- The trafficking of women in Asia
Stay Alive, My Son
-- Pin Yathay, The most important human rights story of the decade.
Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors
-- Dith Pran, From the Publisher
This extraordinary book contains eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors who were children at the time. The memoirs were gathered by Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically portrayed in the film The Killing Fields. These testimonies bear shattering witness to the slaughter committed by the Khmer Rouge. The contributors - most of them now living in the United States and pictured in photographs that accompany their stories - report on life in Democratic Kampuchea as seen through children's eyes. They speak of their bewilderment and pain as Khmer Rouge cadres tore their families apart, subjected them to brainwashing, drove them from their homes to work in forced-labor camps, and executed captives in front of them. Their stories tell of suffering, the loss of innocence, the struggle to survive against all odds, and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
-- This is the astonishing account of America's secret and illegal war against Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.
The Gate
Francois Bizot, Sidney H. Schanberg - LA Times Book Review
This mesmeric book is much more than a survivor's story. It is an agonizing effort to understand what produced such horror and to get inside the Khmer mind.... Bizot has dug further into these mysteries and into the darkness of the Khmer Rouge than any other contemporary I know of....You will find unspoken echoes here of Hitlerism and Stalinism and Maoism, and every other mass slaughter carried out in the name of ideology and purification. Cambodia is no more dated than Srebrenica, especially at a moment when the clank of war machinery is in the global air again....Bizot spills out his viscera, and we see him as whole and as candidly as anyone can expect from a memoirist.....Many passages burn with a lyricism that reminds one of books we call classic literature.
0300096496:Product Link on Barnes & Noble.com.
-- Ben Kiernan, Library Journal
Pol Pot, the paramount leader of Democratic Kampuchea, trumps Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as the most bloodthirsty ruler of modern history. In fewer than four years, Pol Pot's regime caused the death of 1.7 million people in Cambodia, one-fifth of the population. Using hundreds of interviews with survivors, Kiernan, the leading authority on modern Cambodia, meticulously examines Pol Pot's killing machine and clears up many misconceptions found in earlier studies. In chilling detail, he shows that Pol Pot, obsessed with fantasies of ethnic purity and national grandeur, tried to exterminate the Cham, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao minorities in his country. Finally, internal revolt supported by Vietnam caused the regime's collapse.}
Killing Fields
-- DVD,VHS, The Killing Fields is a romanticized adaptation of an eyewitness magazine story by New York Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg. Covering the U.S. pullout from Vietnam in 1975, Schanberg (Sam Waterston) relies on his Cambodian friend and translator Dith Pran (Hang S. Ngor) for inside information. Schanberg has an opportunity to rescue Dith Pran when the U.S. army evacuates all Cambodian citizens; instead, the reporter coerces his friend to remain behind to continue sending him news flashes. Although his family is helicoptered out of Saigon (a recreation of the famous TV news clip), Dith Pran stays with Schanberg on the ground. Racked with guilt, Schanberg does his best to arrange for Dith Pran's escape, but the Cambodian is captured by the dreaded Khmer Rouge