As a recent Cambodian visitor I am grateful that this book exists. Not only selfishly because of the learning and perspective it gave me, but as a historical record that current and future generations can refer to and learn from.I fell in love with Cambodia during my short stay of around two weeks there this past spring. Notably, my (heartbreaking) visits to the landmine museum outside Siem Reap and Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh made me want to understand more. This well researched and very readable

This must be the deepest, most document- and interview-rich study of the origins and operations of the Khmer Rouge regime that's out there. Becker manages to keep her evil subject at a distance to intellectually examine it, and she does that brilliantly. Her account of her 1978 Pol Pot interview is a let-down, and her too detailed history of the reasons for Vietnam's 1979 invasion and 10-year occupation was slow-going and a bit long, but always learned and never truly dull.This is a 600 page tom...

Now that I live here, I figured I kind of have to read up on the Khmer Rouge. Yay.They seem to have run the entire country like a concentration camp, which as it turns out, doesn't work very well as a system of government. They reasoned that if people worked 20 hours a day and ate next to nothing, there should be huge rice surpluses. They also separated families for greater efficiency and generally culled the culture of all non-collectivist farmer oriented elements--useless things like science,

This was a journey and a half. I knew very little about the Khmer Rouge revolution before opening this book save from what I’d learnt about the Vietnam war and from watching the Killing Fields in high school. Elizabeth Becker’s narrative is by no means a short one. It is about 600 pages spanning over 20 years. Nevertheless, despite this and the minimal divisions made by chapter titles or themes, Becker weaves a highly readable story. This history had high potential to be extremely dry and drab b...

Read it three times. Never gets stale. Informative, moving, historical, personal, the narrative is spellbinding. Must read not just for Cambodia enthusiasts, this book is compulsory reading for all observers of human nature.

Heart-Breaking history.

I have read numerous books about the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, and studied the history and politics of Southeast Asia in the 1950'-70's, and found Becker's work in this text to be one of the definitive volumes of journalism and academic research ever written concerning this subject. As a correspondent for the Washington Post in the 70's, Becker closely followed the situation in SE Asia, becoming one of only two American journalists who visited Democratic Kampuchea immediately before it's f...

Monumental in scope and depth, Becker's comprehensive survey of recent Cambodian history ranges from astonishing in its analysis and intensely moving in its portrayal of victims and survivors, to numbingly dull in its meticulous coverage of documents, meetings and people involved in the evolution of communism in Cambodia. It is required reading for anyone who truly wants to understand the origins of the Khmer Rouge, though, and one of Becker's arguments is that the Khmer Rouge were not merely a

This book is an incredible smooth and well-written journey. Becker's many personal accounts to her experience in Cambodia really add a flavour to an otherwise historical account to the recent history of Cambodia.That being said, I read this book in the context of research on Vietnam's intervention in 1979 in Cambodia. Becker omits quite a lot of detail on the possible reasons why Vietnam intervened in Cambodia. Her reasoning is the cultural differences between the two communist states and doesn'...

It's hard to overstate how fascinating - and, at times, sickening - this book was. The author gives a good overview of the origins of modern Cambodian nationalism, and ties that in to the origins of the Khmer Rouge. Then she shows how the Khmer Rouge isolated themselves and persuaded themselves into a self-destructive paranoid frenzy. And then we - the United States - supported the Khmer Rouge once they lost power, because China thought it was a good idea, and once you threw in a bunch of shitty...

When the War Was Over is the work a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who also spent a great deal of time in Cambodia. Given the rather extraordinary nature and destruction of the Khmer Revolution, there is no relevant material in the archives that will be one day be made available to academics so they can write a definitive history of the period. It is entirely possible that Ms. Becker's book is the best one that will ever be available on the period.Pol Pot's biographer Philip Short thinks that...

I find it impossible to rate this book on Goodreads' scale. Was it well-written? Very much so. But did I like it? I can't say that I did; this book was emotionally very difficult to read. Becker doesn't flinch from the brutality and horror perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime. The interviews in particular are heartrending and chilling. While I highly recommend When the War Was Over for researchers and scholars, and for those interested in how a society can be turned upside down almost overnight...

Not only an excellent overview of Cambodian history, but a superb place to begin learning about the complex and interconnected histories and relations of all the nations of Southeast Asia. Becker's book stretches from geopolitics to personal stories to explain how the Khmer Rouge rose to power and how their reign affected the Cambodian people. Dense, but lucidly written, and a compelling read.

Not the best-written book I've read, I found some of the prose, especially early in the book, to be repetitive and/or awkward. The last third of the book is more about the diplomatic relations between Cambodia and other countries, while the first part of the book is about how the Khmer Rouge era impacted individuals. An important part of world history.

Incredible sum. Thorough in every sense of the word ! I'm glad I once stumbled upon the mention of Elizabeth Becker and the tragic death of Malcolm Caldwell, which I had never heard about before. That got me interested on who E. Becker is, and this book eventually.What a tortuous history, with a terrifying psychological backdrop very well rendered by the author, of a whole people descending into hell, a hell that started way before the KR time in power. What is so striking is the paranoia and be...

This book is a very well researched account of this period of Cambodia’s history, with some personal stories about her own experiences in the country thrown in. For someone so closely connected to the situation and people, the author was able to keep a journalistic distance in most of the book but in certain passages she was also able to bring things to a very personal level. As a long-time resident of Southeast Asia, a frequent visitor to Cambodia and an avid reader about the region, I found th...

This is not a book for everyone, though I give it five stars. I have visited Tuol Sleng, the torture campus of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, Cambodia twice now. This book gives a most plausible account of how the madness that spread through Cambodia during that time came to be. It details the roles played by the Vietnamese communists, the French, the Chinese, the United States, and other major actors and players in supporting and even perpetuating the madness that was the Khmer Rouge rule of Ca...

This book is incredibly rich in information about the events that led to the Cambodian Revolution, both in Cambodia and elsewhere in SE Asia. After visiting Cambodia earlier this year, I grew more curious to learn about the Khmer Rouge and their motivations for what they did between 1975 and 1979. This book explains that and more, diving into the history of Cambodia and its relationships with other nations. It was also helpful to understand more of the context of what was happening in the rest o...

I needed a good place to start in wrapping my mind around the history of Cambodia and what lead to the genocide during the Khmer Rouge. This book gave me a very detailed account of the culture and people of Cambodia both hundreds of years before the Khmer Rouge, the events leading up to it and of course the aftermath. It reads well and has a lot of insight. If you want to understand a large part of the history of Southeast Asia over the past 100 years, the history of Cambodia is a good place to

The Cambodian portion of the Vietnam war has always been hazy to me, and it will take more than one book to sort it out. But this one is a good beginning, deftly sorting through the complexities of affiliations, battles, atrocities, and attempted solutions. It is depressing to read how antipathy to Vietnam blinded US from seeing Khmer Rouge atrocities while attempting to continue punishing Vietnam. It was depressing to read of attempted peace plans being sabotaged at the last minute by various a...

The third book about the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge was improved by the author having been in Cambodia before, having interviewed Pol Pot during and continued on into the period after UNTAC. I learnt things I hadn't known and enjoyed the descriptions of places and people, something this author could do well, having been there and met lots of them. Wel worth reading for someone interested in the recent history of Cambodia and how it got to be like how it is now.

Outstanding. Everything you want to know about the Khmer Rouge is here -- up to 1985, that is. The book was published in 1986, so you are kind of left hanging. Nevertheless, it is a beautifully written, (almost) all-encompassing tome about what may be the most confounding and horrific political movement of the 20th century.

Detailed and comprehensive.I rarely give 5 star reviews, but this book earned it. Not only did it detail the rise and fall off the Khmer Rouge, but also the histories of nearby countries. There is an amount of context the reader needs to bring with them (mostly the history of the American Vietnam war) but Becker does an excellent job of providing the rest.

I began reading this book the day I left Cambodia, and flew through it. The author tells this heartbreaking story in an authentic, haunting voice - I highly recommend especially if you've been or are planning to go to Cambodia.

I found this a fantastic account of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, and really appreciated the author's work placing the narrative into global context. I learned a lot about the roles of Vietnam, China, and the USSR as well as the USA.

The information is soooo good. But the book is hard to get through. She uses ten words when one will do.

A terrific, in-depth look at the years proceeding, during, and following the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

They described during the Khmer rouge and when we found a way independent.

A stunning portrayal of modern Cambodia, the genocide, and indochinese relations of the 20th century. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in Cambodian politics!

well, I really love to know about history especially Khmer history, and I think this book is going to tell me about the Khmer rouge revolution and how people survive in Cambodia during that period.