Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Exhaustive...Exhausting... More of an academic thesis than a work for the laity
Comment: Very detailed extrapolation/speculation about the political maneuverings in the highest level of government during the nightmarish reign of the Khmer Rouge (1974-79). The problem is that Cambodia was so insular at that time, and so few top-level leaders survived the numerous purges, that most of this book is by necessity a painstaking reconstruction from source documents. I don't doubt that the field needs a book like this... but rigorous academic works such as this tend by nature to be slow and dry reading for the lay public. It is a fascinating, morbid, horrible chapter in human history, and very relevant to current politics, especially if you are sympathetic to the view that Pol Pot's reign may have been a sponsored experiment of oligarchical collectivists who continue to hold sway in the World Bank and IMF today.
I gave it four stars as a compromise: I would say it deserves 5 stars if you have a professional interest in the subject, but if you are a tourist reading up on the country, or somebody who is just kind of curious and wondering why there was a genocide in Cambodia, I would give it three stars, and recommend you start with lighter fare.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An early work
Comment: This is an early, perhaps one of the first full length, biographies of Pl Pot, the man who lead the Cambodian genocide. A prodigy of a middle class family he went to France where he became a radical communist and journeyed back with other Cambodians he had met where the led a long revolution against the government of Cambodia that lasted from 1965-1975. Upon gaining power they emptied the cities and some 2 million of an overall population of only 8 million, died in Cambodia. He suppressed and committed genocide against the Muslim Chams of Cambodia and he deported and murdered almost a quarter of a million Vietnamese. Despite the fact that he also destroyed the Chinese community of Cambodia he was supported by China. In 1976 the Vietnamese invaded and Pol Pot fled into the mountains. He and his movement, the Khmer Rouge, survived up until 2003. This book is therefore outdated but well written. Only two journalists, both of whome supported the genocide, were in Cambodia during the war and therefore there was little knowledge at the time.
Seth J. Frantzman
Customer Rating:
Summary: The way to make friends is not to kill people
Comment: Prof. Chandler discovered the real face behind Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), the initially enigmatic leader of the Red Khmer in Cambodia. He wrote a hallucinatory and tragic biography.The background of Pol Pot is common for many Communist Party (CP) members. He was recruited by the local CP when he studied in a foreign country. For Pol Pot, it was in France where the CP was totally controlled by the USSR and her Stalinist doctrine. The USSR recruited foreign members everywhere in order to use them as antennas all over the world.
When Pol Pot took power in Cambodia, he applied the Stalinist doctrine ruthlessly.
The similarities with Stalin are eminently striking: power struggle at the top of the party and liquidation of the old fellows, savage party purges, murderous goulags, indiscriminate collectivization, ethnic cleansing, deportation, show trials, forced confessions under torture, affectionate with little daughter, considering as enemies of the State those Khmer who came from a foreign country, fear of assassination, suspicious, dictatorial (didn't accept the slightest form of criticism).
Under Pol Pot, it went even so far that people who 'knew' an enemy where executed. The result: a genocide. Even children and BABIES were put to death.
David Chandler shows us that Pol Pot was really a dedicated communist, a party man, an organization man, a utopian thinker who believed in his killer's utopia till the end: "I did everything for my country".
A blatant lie: he did it only for his Khmer country and only for those Khmer who (were forced to) agree(d) with him. In other words, his utopia was more than nationalism, it was racism. For Pol Pot knew that 'Class and hatred had produced the victory. So hatred had to be maintained'.
This book contains excellent explanations of the background of the Cambodian conflict with Vietnam, and how Cambodia became a chess piece in a world conflict between the US, China and the USSR. Pol Pot's regime was supported by the US, because Cambodia was an enemy of Vietnam, who was an ally of the USSR.
This book stresses also the disastrous role of the feudalist king Norodom Sihanouk and the decisive influence of the US bombings of Cambodia, which turned part of the Khmer peasantry in favour of the Red Khmer.
Pol Pot's regime is a shame for Western intelligentsia, because some of his cronies (Khieu Samphan) studied like Pol Pot at Western universities.
This terrible biography is a reminder of the deadly dangers of utopian doctrines, if they can be implemented by a totally convinced individual who possesses a dictatorial power in a single ountry. As David Chandler states: the genocide would have continued, if Pol Pot had stayed in power.
A must read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brother Number One
Comment: I thought that this book was extremely well written and intellectually stimulating. While providing as many details about Pol Pot's life as can be found, Chandler also integrates this information into the recent history of Cambodia. He seems to believe that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can only be understood in the context of the times, and this definitely rings true after reading the book. True, he does offer a lot of interpretation and conjecture on Pol Pot's life and motives, but this is the job of the historian. Rarely do historical documents, especially documents about the Khmer Rouge, provide such information. Those who intend to understand and write about these events, are therefore forced to do this kind of interpretive work. So do not listen the first review given on this page. This book is awesome.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pol Pot - still hard to grasp
Comment: If you are looking for a history of the Khmer Rouge regime, I'd rather recommend one of Ben Kiernan's books. If you are looking for a well-documented biography of Pol Pot, you are not going to like this book.
True, the author has gathered as much information on Pol Pot as possible, but that amount of information could be summarised on just a few pages. To make it into a book, you get a history of Cambodia - and there are better ones around than this one -, and lots of speculation about Pol Pot's psychology, which I found annoying.
