Pol Pot: The history of a nightmare - Tapa blanda

'The first full biography of the man who led Cambodia into darkness.' - Sue Baker -- Publishing News 20050304 'Short has written the definitive account of the nightmarish regime of 1975-1978, responsible for the deaths of some 1.5 million Cambodians.' -- Contemporary Review 20050301 'Short succeeds in building a complete, compelling portrait of the man' -- Herald 20050709 'Philip Short! has done a spectacularly efficient job of describing what happened, and how' -- Economist 20041106 'Riveting' -- Scotsman 20041106 'Short has created a terrifying narrative of destruction.' -- Daily Telegraph 20041106 'Brilliantly detailed' -- Sunday Herald 20041031 'The result is a searching account' -- Sunday Times 20050814 'Exhaustive and authoritative' -- Times Literary Supplement 20050401

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 concentration camp of the mind, 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 Philip Short traces Pol Pot's life from altruistic youth to become one of the twentieth century's most egregious political monsters.