Yale University Press 2012. Softcover, 422 pp.
The political history of Cambodia between 1945 and 1979, which
culminated in the devastating revolutionary excesses of the Pol Pot
regime, is one of unrest and misery. This book by David P. Chandler is
the first to give a full account of this tumultuous period. Drawing on
his experience as a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh, on
interviews, and on archival material. Chandler considers why the
revolution happened and how it was related to Cambodia's earlier history
and to other events in Southeast Asia. He describes Cambodia's brief
spell of independence from Japan after the end of World War II; the long
and complicated rule of Norodom Sihanouk, during which the Vietnam War
gradually spilled over Cambodia's borders; the bloodless coup of 1970
that deposed Sihanouk and put in power the feeble, pro-American
government of Lon Nol; and the revolution in 1975 that ushered in the
radical changes and horrors of Pol Pot's Communist regime. Chandler
discusses how Pol Pot and his colleagues evacuated Cambodia's cities and
towns, transformed its seven million people into an unpaid labor force,
tortured and killed party members when agricultural quotas were unmet,
and were finally overthrown in the course of a Vietnamese military
invasion in 1979. His book is a penetrating and poignant analysis of
this fierce revolutionary period and the events of the previous
quarter-century that made it possible.