Killing Fields [Mass Market Paperback]

Christopher Hudson (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Dell (September 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440144590
• ISBN-13: 978-0440144595
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #512,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A shocking and disturbing tale, October 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Killing Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

The killing fields is a story about war and horror, murder and terror but also about hope and friendship. The story emerges in the early 1970s in war torn Cambodia, where the communist Khmer Rouge are trying to overthrow the american backed government of Lon Nol. The american journalist Sydney Schanberg and his cambodian assistant Dith Pran are covering the advance of the Khmer Rouge towards the capital of Phnom Penh. In 1975 when the rebells finally enter the capital and seize power, the lives of the residents change dramatically. The Khmer Rouge want to impose a stoneage-like agriculture communism and for that purpose they force the whole population to live and work on the countryside and besides they try to kill all educated, upper class and critical people.
As the foreigner Schanberg will soon be sent out of Cambodia, for Pran, as a well educated cambodian citizen things soon turn to the worst.
What follows is a three year struggle for life. That means Pran has to deny his real identity and pretend having worked his lifetime in the countryside. He will witness murder and the unbelievable behavior of Khmer Rouge soldiers, he will suffer from malnutrition and the loss of friends and relatives and he will fight every day to live and hope for an end of his nightmare.
This book shows with the shocking example of Dith Pran, through what hell the cambodian people went under the terror reign of the Khmer Rouge. Furthermore this book provides a lot of background information. Being both journalists, Schanberg and Pran have a lot of knowledge, the average cambodian citizen never had. So the reader learns very precisely about the actions that took place when the Khmer Rouge took power. The reader also learns how it was like being a foreigner amid this turmoil and how the new regime treated them.
This book is an example for the fate of the cambodian people and the shocking and disturbing story will help the reader to realize, what actually took place and how the people had to suffer.
I can recommend this book to everyone who is interested in Cambodia and South East Asia. But, in particular, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what cruelties happen on earth and how brutal people can actually be.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Warning - Fiction !, January 17, 2006

By 

Alan Algustyniak (Los Angeles area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Killing Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

There are several very good to excellent non-fiction books about this subject. Why read a made-up story, when the reality is just as interesting and more important to know? I suggest instead, "The Stones Cry Out", "Cambodian Witness", "Year Zero" and "First They Killed My Father".

Here are excerpts from the 'prolog':
"This book was inspired by the true story. . .numerous incidents have been embellished or invented. . .It is not intended that . . .all incidents depicted herein should be regarded as having actually occured."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Auto-genocide..., April 29, 2011

By 

John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Killing Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

There have been numerous genocides throughout history; several have occurred in the 20th Century: the Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan ones immediately come to mind. What occurred in Cambodia in the second half of the `70's were devastating mass killings of the Cambodian people, but this event does not easily fit into the normal pattern of genocide, that is, the massive killing of one ethnic group by another. Rather, it was initially based on education level, and then seemed to metastasize into an orgy of killing for killing's sake. The rather clunky compound word that is the subject title was invented in an attempt to give a short-hand description to this unique event, certainly for the 20th Century.

While other genocides have been more carefully documented and examined, the one in Cambodia has been largely ignored. No doubt the fact that both the United States and China continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the "legitimate government" of Cambodia, long after irrefutable evidence of this genocide was available, is part of the reason. Around two million people, one third of Cambodia's population, died during the late `70's. And I still recall the remark of a friend who worked in the Peace Corps in Thailand during the `60's, and who visited Cambodia, pre-war: "I found the Cambodians the gentlest people on earth." The how and the why of this enormous tragedy have never been fully answered.

Hudson's book takes the form of a "docudrama"; a re-creation of events based on the known facts. He draws on one of the few other excellent sources then available: William Shawcross, author of Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, as well as articles published by one of the principal characters, the New York Times journalist, Sydney Schanberg. Like a few other honest journalists, Neil Sheehan, and others, Schanberg did not buy the "party line" peddled by the US military about the continued success of efforts in Cambodia. This book's principal theme is his relationship with his Cambodian "stringer," Dith Pran. Pran once saved Schanberg's life, yet Schanberg is forced to abandon Pran at the French Embassy. Schanberg escapes to the United States, but it haunted by the fate of Pran, who endures life under the murderous Khmer Rouge for five years.

As to the all-important question of why this occurred, and it definitely comes across as forced, but Hudson places the following explanation in the mouth of Schanberg, when he is at a diplomatic party discussing the British interventions in China of the previous century (the so-called Opium Wars): "The Chinese forgave you. What about the Khmer Rouge? Five years of saturation bombing. Thousands of gallons of napalm. Tens of thousands of them blown up or incinerated. No means of retaliation; nothing to turn their fury on except their own people. Do you think they're going to forget and forgive?" And I concur. The essence of the matter was the relentless B-52 bombing campaigns against a largely illiterate peasant mass, led by a few Parisian-educated young student "intellectuals" who were determined to re-do the world, totally evacuating Phnom Penh, and declaring the time to be "Year Zero."
In 1989 the population of Phnom Penh was 50,000. By 1994, it was 1.4 million, as people fled the continued fighting in the countryside. That was the year I visited the country. I was the only one, for over a two hour period, at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, now a museum dedicated to the Cambodian holocaust. Later, I visited the glass "stupa" of skulls at Choeung Ek; again the only one there.

It takes a virtually impossible act of imagination to envision what it was like to live through this era. Hudson's attempt is an important and reasonable one, though it verges towards what would make a good movie, which it ultimately was The Killing Fields. 4-stars.