This is one of those true stories that is so much more bizarre and unreal than any work of fiction. It’s a look at the leader of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, whose Khmer Rouge troops killed about two million people in the country and who did one of the strangest things of the 20th Century – running nearly all the inhabitants of Phnom Penh out of the city and into the fields and into abject poverty.
What’s chilling about this book and why I recommend it is that all the elements that led to Pol Pot’s rise not so many years ago are there today in that region – extreme poverty and corrupt governments – and this kind of social implosion could happen again. |
