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Cambodia Now: Life In the Wake of War

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Karen Coates has written a warts 'n' all view of contemporary Cambodia, giving us a glimpse into how hard life really is in a country traumatized by war but which still retains a magical quality that attracts and infatuates people like Coates and her husband Jerry Redfern, both journalists who worked in-country on and off for six years. Personally, I loved the book, I could hardly put it down. I could relate to many of the people Coates met on her travels, and if you get the chance to stay long enough in Cambodia, you will meet them too.

My emotions fluctuated wildly between elation and dismay as I read the stories meshed together from her interviews with scores of Cambodians, from the fragile hope of street beggar Bun Na, to the dogged determination of commune leader Ly Chheng Ky, a lone woman in a typically male-dominated environment. She introduces us to Choun Nhiem, better known as the old sweeper of Ta Prohm from the cover of the popular Lonely Planet guidebook. She interviewed three people I've met on my own travels; Rithy Keo, a supervisor at the Kien Khleang rehab center just outside Phnom Penh, enthusiastic conservationist Tom Evans, working in the forests of Mondulkiri, and Youk Chhang, the tireless and dedicated director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. These three are just the tip of the iceberg of unsung heroes and heroines working to make a better Cambodia. But its a tough job and Coates makes that abundantly clear throughout her twenty-one chapters, in which she examines the past, present and future, dissecting Cambodia's many ills and its' hopes. This book is a must read for anyone seeking to delve below the flimsy veil of idyllic Cambodian life that most of the tourist hordes see and believe is the real Cambodia. They have little idea of what lies just below the surface.

Cambodia Now captures beauty in a traumatized country by focusing on individual Cambodians and their lives. This book goes far to explain how everyday Cambodians, not the power brokers and not the tour guides, are slowly recovering from the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

This book delves into many issues that Cambodia is facing today, leaving the reader with a greater knowledge of this country and its people. Through individual stories of regular Cambodian people to official interviews with government officials, this book covers it all.

Following my first trip to Cambodia in 2008 I developed a strong interest in Cambodia and started reading books that related to the tragic Khmer Rouge history. But my understanding of contemporary Cambodia was lacking. I really wanted to know more about Cambodia now in more depth and in it's struggle to recover. I had a lot of questions. Then I discovered Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War. Cambodia Now is the book that has more than adequately fulfilled that need for me. The author takes the reader in depth and with remarkable insights through a wide range of topics from land mine survivors, health care, conservation efforts to the economic, social and psychological aftermath of Cambodia's tragic history. To my knowledge, there is no other resource of this kind that educates the reader about contemporary Cambodia. Equipped with a deeper understanding of Cambodia (and a smattering of Khmer) my recent trip was considerably more enriching. And there is always more to learn. I've been recommending this book to everyone I know who is interested in Cambodia. Back from my second trip to Cambodia and I'm on my second reading of some of the chapters.

Having been to Cambodia both in the 1990s and as recently as last year, I found "Cambodia Now" to accurately (and compassionately) capture the nuances of the country. The power of this book is in its details---the people author Karen Coates meets and chronicles as she seeks a way of understanding modern Cambodia. It's not just her visit to a place like Anlong Veng (Pol Pot's last outpost and Ta "The Butcher" Mok's former home) that make this book so harrowing. It's her encounters with everyday people whose lives, more than 25 years after the Khmer Rouge were defeated (though not vanquished, as the following civil war attested), are still profoundly affected by that time.