Pol Pot

Philip Short was present at close range for the only official trip Pol Pot ever made abroad, a visit to China in 1975. Short recalls the leader's personal magnetism, which sat oddly beside what followed: Pol Pot became the mastermind of a bold and brutal attempt to remake society from the ground up. The egalitarian ideal he pursued in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge turned into a campaign of terror, and by starvation and execution roughly a fifth of the population, over a million people, died.

The book asks how a hopeful vision of fairness and prosperity could become one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. Short travelled across Cambodia, spoke with former Khmer Rouge leaders, and worked through archives that had long been closed to researchers. Among those who speak for the first time here are Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's brother-in-law and foreign minister.

Short's account follows Pol Pot's rise and the machinery of the regime he built, setting out how the country was left devastated. It is a portrait of a man who led one of the most secretive and frightening governments of the modern era.