John Murray, UK
ISBN: 0719565685
Henry Holt & Company, USA*
ISBN: 0805066624

Short brings his 25 years of reporting with the BBC and four years of research to bear in this historical biography.  Here, Short attempts to understand how Pol Pot, a relatively promising youth, became one of the world's most notorious dictators. This important and engrossing book shows how Cambodia, supposedly a neutral country, was ruthlessly exploited by others, including the Chinese, Americans and Vietnamese. It also reveals how the United States helped, at one stage, to maintain Pol Pot's rule for its own designs against the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

*The US edition of this book has a slightly different subtitle, "Anatomy of a Nightmare."

Philip Short

Philip Short has been a foreign correspondent for The Times (London), The Economist, and the BBC in Uganda, Moscow, China, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of the definitive biography of Mao Tse-tung, and lived in China and Cambodia in the 1970s and early 1980s, where he has returned regularly ever since. He now lives in southern France with his wife.

Author information and photo from: www.henryholt.com