Dimensions
152 x 234 x 42mm
A gripping and important biography of one of the 20th century’s most reviled political monsters.
The man the world knew as Pol Pot headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times. In the three and a half years of his rule in Cambodia, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling peasants became a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the killing fields.
Philip Short has spent four years travelling the length and breadth of Cambodia, interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge movement and sifting through previously closed archives from China, Russia and Vietnam, as well as Cambodia itself. Here, the former Khmer Rouge Head of State, Pol’s brother-in-law and scores of lesser figures speak for the first time at length about their beliefs and motives, as Short traces Pol Pot’s life from altruistic youth to one of the twentieth century’s most egregious political monsters.
