Download or read book In The Shadow Of The Banyan written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday

Download or read book Escape from Phnom Penh Americans in the Cambodian War written by Colonel Roy Sullivan USA RET and published by Author House. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Army lieutenant colonel Sam Briscoe volunteers for a job in exotic, wartime Cambodia to escape the routines of Pentagon duty and an acrid divorce. His new job gains an unexpected dimension when the Army Chief of Staff assigns Briscoe a secret task while in Cambodia which only the Chief of Staff and an Assistant Secretary of State know about. Once in Phnom Penh, Briscoes immediate boss, Brigadier General Cleveland, orders him to eliminate phantom soldiers from Cambodian army payrolls. Cleveland also admonishes Briscoe against advising the Cambodians and talking to reporters, particularly American ones. Briscoe quickly discovers that the pay for the non-existent or phantom soldiers goes into the pockets of their commanders. This introduces him to the fraud and graft rampant in the Cambodian armed forces as well as the government. Briscoes no win job is further complicated by an instantaneous--but forbidden romance--withAmerican freelance reporter Beth Keller. Once the American ambassador, to whom General Cleveland reports, hears about the romance, he tries to blackmail Briscoe into coercing Beth to soften her scathing investigative reporting about diplomatic bumbling at the American Embassy. While inspecting Cambodian infantry battalions, Briscoe unwittingly crosses the grey line between advising and assisting about which Cleveland warned. Beth Kellers widely publicized article in U.S. media highlights Briscoes disobeying the U.S. Congressional edict, as well as his own generals admonition against advising. How Beth and Briscoe solve their personal problems, while balancing their jobs and precarious positions with the ambassador and general, add to the drama of the helicopter evacuation of Americans from Communist-besieged Phnom Penh. The struggle between the army officer, his general, the ambassador plus an embassy political officer stalking Beth ends with the evacuation. One of the four will be the last American escaping Phnom Penh. Another wont make it.

Download or read book Golden Bones written by Sichan Siv and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls. Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand." He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.

Download or read book Stay Alive My Son written by Pin Yathay and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields.With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the "New People," displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness.Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. "Stay alive, my son," he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border.First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of Stay Alive, My Son includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin Yathay's message.

Download or read book The Pol Pot Regime written by Ben Kiernan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition of Ben Kiernan's account of the Cambodian revolution and genocide includes a new preface that takes the story up to 2008 and the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal. Kiernan's other books include 'Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur' and 'How Pol Pot Came to Power'.

Download or read book Year of the Rabbit written by Tian Veasna and published by Drawn & Quarterly. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One family's quest to survive the devastation of the Khmer Rouge Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family’s desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country’s major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens. Cartoonist Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Khmer Rouge takeover, as his family set forth on the chaotic mass exodus from Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit is based on firsthand accounts, all told from the perspective of his parents and other close relatives. Stripped of any money or material possessions, Veasna’s family found themselves exiled to the barren countryside along with thousands of others, where food was scarce and brutal violence a constant threat. Year of the Rabbit shows the reality of life in the work camps, where Veasna’s family bartered for goods, where children were instructed to spy on their parents, and where reading was proof positive of being a class traitor. Constantly on the edge of annihilation, they realized there was only one choice—they had to escape Cambodia and become refugees. Veasna has created a harrowing, deeply personal account of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.

Download or read book Aid Dependence in Cambodia written by Sophal Ear and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dr. Ear argues that the international community has chosen to prioritize political stability above all other governance dimensions, and in so doing has traded a modicum of democracy for an ounce of security. Focusing on post-1993 Cambodia, Ear explores the unintended consequences in post-conflict environments of foreign aid. He chooses Cambodia both for personal reasons--which infuses an academic analysis with a compelling sense of urgency--and because it is one of the most aid-drenched countries in modern history. He tries to explain the relationship between Cambodia's aid dependence and its appallingly poor governance. He concludes that despite decades of aid, technical cooperation, four national elections, no open warfare, and some progress in some parts of the economy, Cambodia is one broken government away from disaster."--Publisher's description.

Download or read book Children of Cambodia s Killing Fields written by Kim DePaul and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Fact Sheet This extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts by Cambodian survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s offers searing testimony to an era of brutality, brainwashing, betrayals, starvation, & gruesome executions.

Download or read book The Fall of Phnom Penh written by Roland Neveu and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique eyewitness photographic account and recount of the Fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975 (in Cambodia).

Download or read book Facing Death in Cambodia written by Peter H. Maguire and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the story of Peter Maguire's effort to learn how Cambodia's "culture of impunity" developed, why it persists, and the failures of the "international community" to confront the Cambodian genocide. Written from a personal and historical perspective, Facing Death in Cambodia recounts Maguire's growing anguish over the gap between theories of universal justice and political realities. Maguire documents the atrocities and the aftermath through personal interviews with victims and perpetrators, discussions with international officials, journalistic accounts, and government sources.

Download or read book Phnom Penh Noir written by Christopher G. Moore and published by Asia Document Bureau Limited. This book was released on 2012 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many noir anthologies have inspired writers and publishers around the world to gather novelists to set noir stories in a city. When it comes to noir, not all cities are equal. The history of genocide and dislocation sets Phnom Penh apart from other places. What other city in modern times was emptied of all of his people at gun point, a city abandoned and left as a ghost town? The authors of Phnom Penh Noir take you inside the lives of Cambodians who carry that legacy of that fateful day on 17th April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge arrived and forced the population to evacuate to the countryside. The Khmer Rouge experiment resulted in radical transformation of a society that left a bloody trail, one that left almost no family untouched, and hovers close to the surface in these stories. In Phnom Penh Noir, the stories, lyrics, and cover photograph have joined legendary creative talents like Roland Joffe, James Grady and John Burdett along with a young generation of Cambodians. The noir tales unfold through multiple points of view and enrich the reading experience. Truth, mortality, regret, betrayal, and loss play out in these stories, poetry and lyrics. The authors and publishers will contribute twenty percent of their earnings from this book to selected charity organizations in Cambodia. Official website: www.phnompenhnoir.com

Download or read book Escape written by David McMillan and published by Monsoon Books. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Klong Prem prison, Thailand. The “Bangkok Hilton”, where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan’s perilous break-out from Asia’s most notorious prison. From his arrest at Don Muang airport, to awaiting trial inside Klong Prem, he provides an insight into the lives of the British, Australian, American and other Western prisoners as they are destroyed by disease, neglect and despair. Death is their only way out. Two weeks before a near-certain death sentence McMillan escapes, never to be seen in Thailand again.

Download or read book The Elimination written by Rithy Panh and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil. The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Download or read book Escape from Violence written by Aristide R. Zolberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-08-10 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnitude of refugees movements in the Third World, widely perceived as an unprecedented crisis, has generated widespread concern in the West. This concern reveals itself as an ambiguous mixture of heartfelt compassion for the plight of the unfortunates cast adrift and a diffuse fear that they will come "pouring in." In this comprehensive study, the authors examine the refugee flows originating in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and suggest how a better understanding of this phenomenon can be used by the international community to assist those in greatest need. Reviewing the history of refugee movements in the West, they show how their formation and the fate of endangered populations have also been shaped by the partisan objectives of receiving countries. They survey the kinds of social conflicts characteristic of different regions of the Third World and the ways refugees and refugee policy are made to serve broader political purposes.

Download or read book Translations on South and East Asia written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Little Brother written by Allan Baillie and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2004-04-05 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shots were so close they seemed to explode inside Vithy's head. He threw himself to the ground and clapped his hands over his ears . . . It's Cambodia. The killing machine that is the Khmer Rouge is in power. Vithy has lost everyone and everything he loved – except his older brother, Mang. They've escaped from almost certain execution, but the brothers become separated and Vithy is left alone to 'follow the lines . . . to the border' – his brother's last instructions. But which lines? Which border? A gripping tale of the journey of a boy alone and in danger as he tries to find his brother and escape to freedom.

Download or read book Alive in the Killing Fields written by Nawuth Keat and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alive in the Killing Fields is the real-life memoir of Nawuth Keat, a man who survived the horrors of war-torn Cambodia. He has now broken a longtime silence in the hope that telling the truth about what happened to his people and his country will spare future generations from similar tragedy. In this captivating memoir, a young Nawuth defies the odds and survives the invasion of his homeland by the Khmer Rouge. Under the brutal reign of the dictator Pol Pot, he loses his parents, young sister, and other members of his family. After his hometown of Salatrave was overrun, Nawuth and his remaining relatives are eventually captured and enslaved by Khmer Rouge fighters. They endure physical abuse, hunger, and inhumane living conditions. But through it all, their sense of family holds them together, giving them the strength to persevere through a time when any assertion of identity is punishable by death. Nawuth’s story of survival and escape from the Killing Fields of Cambodia is also a message of hope; an inspiration to children whose worlds have been darkened by hardship and separation from loved ones. This story provides a timeless lesson in the value of human dignity and freedom for readers of all ages.