Reviews

Surviving The Killing Fields: The Cambodian Odyssey Of Haing S. Ngor by Haing Ngor, Roger Warner

bobbo49's review against another edition

5.0

A book I've been meaning to read for a long time - and the writing met my expectations, formed from watching The Killing Fields in the late 1980s and finally visiting Cambodia 11 years ago. Of course, Ngor's experience of the Khmer Rouge years was far more brutal and evil than the movie (in which he played a real Cambodian journalist), because Hollywood understood that people wouldn't pay to see such intense realities. Nonetheless, his autobiography is unsparing - he even warns readers at several points that they might want to skip a chapter here and there. A grim snapshot of what happened - with American, Chinese and Soviet complicity - in Southeast Asia in the second half of the Twentieth Century. That Ngor, having survived Cambodia, was ultimately killed by Asian-American gang members in a botched robbery in Los Angeles just a few years after winning an Oscar for his (first ever) performance as an actor in The Killing Fields (with some speculation as to the role of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in ordering a killing) is just the final irony in Ngor's incredible life.