When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, Revised Edition

The authoritative history of the Cambodian Revolution and its aftermath.

“An impressive feat of scholarship and reporting: intelligent, measured, resourceful.” —Washington Post

The day they took over Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge closed the borders and drove the citizens out of towns and cities into the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields. Torture, terror, starvation, and death became routine. The intelligentsia was exterminated. Ultimately, almost two million people—nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population—were killed in one of the twentieth century’s worst crimes against humanity.

When the War Was Over is award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker’s masterful history of the Cambodian nightmare, from its origins in French colonialism and the Vietnam War, to dictator Pol Pot’s political education in Paris, to the killing fields across Cambodia. In this newly updated edition, Becker lays out the impact of the Khmer Rouge genocide on modern Cambodia.

Comprehensive, compassionate, and propulsive, When the War Was Over illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning.