Great book, providing a high level overview of Cambodia. From the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, to Vietnam taking over the country in 1979, to the UN getting involved. The primary focus of the book is from when the UN took over until 2011.
Cambodia, is a country where over 80 percent of the the people are by and large, living no differently than they did 1000 years ago.
This is not a people who recognize the value of a democracy. A huge amount of the country is illiterate, can read or write. The poverty level, and way they live is nearly unfathomable with mass malnutrition, disease and above all horrendous corruption.
Ad in the UN, and various world governments, as well as NGO's spending billions, and the nothing really has changed and no one has cut off the money.
Sadly Cambodia is a corrupt train wreck, but the people at least have a relatively stable government, which is very helpful for a country where over half the population suffers from severe PTSD.
The story is great for exposing the levels of corruption, the affects of PTSD has on the country, the uselessness of the UN, many world governments, and NGO's who have done very little for the population at large but have done a fantastic job enriching the government. ( )

Cambodia - one of the worst suffering lands in Asia, comparable in some areas only to Burma or North Korea.

The author does a good job at chronicling the sufferings of the people - corruption, famine, disease, violence. He won awards for said efforts. His years of witnessing suffering, though, have made him almost cynical. He resents the efforts of a foreign clinic owner who tries to provide health care to the rural pour, and in a fit of despair, remarks that the Cambodian people are resigned to accept tyranny, and begs the question of any aid would help at all. He neglects whatever good may have happened in the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, and instead focuses on the continued suffering. Suffering sells books.

You may call me overly idealistic, but I must disagree with a central tenet of the author. It is possible for countries to be developed after years of mismanagement and poverty. It will not always be easy, of course, but it has to be done anyway, because it is the right thing. ( )

Written by an experienced reporter on all matters Cambodian whilst working at the New York Times Joel Brinkley has managed to mix a bare-bones post Khmer Rouge political history with socio-cultural insights derived from some 200 interviews with Cambodians from all walks of life and extensive reading of various reports released by UN agencies and NGOs involved in field work.
His essential conclusion? As a result of the untreated nation-wide PTSD and cultural bias of accepting one's lot in life Cambodians passively accept the massive corruption and human rights abuses that their post Khmer Rouge leaders have inflicted, continue to inflict and will for the foreseeable future inflict upon them. He does give some slight reason for hope - those Cambodians who manage to make it into the NGO system have been of successively higher quality as employees and university students are more willing to ask harder questions of guest lecturers. Thin hope indeed but when things are as bad as they are in Cambodia any hope is grasped by both hands and held onto tightly.
Worth a read for the post Khmer Rouge political history and as an 'inoculation' against the desire to see Cambodia as improving after the trauma inflicted upon it by Saloth Sar and his henchmen.