Reviews

This was very hard and challenging book. I have read many difficult books, but I think this one is the most difficult one. I made me feel very sad so often, angry and I lost hope few times.
But as challenging and difficult book this is, it is also so very important. This is a part of our history, it did happen, and not even so far back in history. I could not read much at a time in this book and at one time I had to take a few days off and read another book, the book kind of finished me!

I first came across this book when travelling around Asia. I had recently been to the Killing Fields and S-21 prison when I saw this book on somebody's bunkbed in my room in a hostel. I checked it out online and knew I needed to read it sometime. Now was the right time.

sparksinthevoid's review against another edition

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it is obviously very hard to read this - the casual and detached way in which ngor describes his torture and despair is as moving as it is frightening.

structurally, it was very smart to first include a picture of how cambodia looked like before the khmer rouge regime, and that it was a society that functioned on its own even if different from western societies. (however, i could have done without details of his love life, i really didn't know that he slept with his patients and cheated on his wife...)

roger warner's epilogue, while containing some interesting information about ngor's life that is not included in his part of the book, was condescending and wildly inappropriate. warner has no right to call ngor a 'difficult person' and someone who refuses to build a bridge between cambodia and the western world when ngor didn't owe him - and us - anything. participating in a movie and writing a book about the khmer rouge regime is not something that he needed to give us to strengthen our understanding and warner should understand that.

book 2 for my bearing witness: literature, memory, trauma module

firerosearien's review against another edition

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5.0

I can't remember the last time a book made me so sad. Not just a 'meh', but a I-need-to-go-find-a-quiet-place-where-I-don't-have-to-talk-to-anyone-and-I-can-just bawl-my-eyes-out kind of sad.

I've read multiple Holocaust memoirs, but the suffering Haing Ngor went through is at another level. As he loses everyone dear to him (well, almost everyone) one-by-one, I'm there praying that his wife, his sole support, his reason for living makes it through the Khmer Rouge, but nope. He, a doctor specializing OB-GYN cannot save his wife during a difficult, complicated birth caused by her malnutrition.

Although Ngor survives the Khmer Rouge, he doesn't ever really heal (the epilogue in this edition follows him up until his death in 1996). This is a haunting, harrowing account of what no human should ever have to endure.

mad_s's review against another edition

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5.0

I came across this book at work when I was bored and looking at all the books we had in shelves and since then I was meaning to read it. Now, few months later i finished it and i gotta say it was some heavy reading. It’s definitely worth the time tho, especially if you don’t know much about Pol Pot and his regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. I think it’s important to know at least briefly the history of other countries in the world and especially these hard and horrible times. I will definitely keep recommending this book to others who are at least somehow interested in history.

vanderweerdt's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

4.5

mercedesdawn's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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