| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

David Chandler. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison. (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 238. Cloth $48.00, paper $17.95.

This book represents a methodical case study of the Khmer Rouge's secret prison at Tuol Sleng during its genocidal rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, when nearly two million people, out of seven million, perished. At the prison, code-named S-21, the Communist regime interrogated and tortured over 14,000 men, women, and children before executing them at the nearby Choeung Ek killing field. Whereas earlier studies on the Khmer Rouge have focused on its leaders or on the regime in general, this study concentrates on S-21. As such, it contributes to a better understanding of the secretive and violent aspects of the paranoid Khmer Rouge regime and fills a gap in the literature on violence in Southeast Asia. 1

David Chandler is a noted authority on Cambodia, having served there as a U.S. foreign service officer and written many books on its history. Moreover, he is fluent in the Khmer language, as seen from his interviews with many Cambodians and from his meticulous examination of the primary source materials, including "over a thousand confession texts" (p. x). To his credit, he has also used an array of secondary sources to examine violence in other prison settings, in both communist and noncommunist countries, for "comparative insights" (p. x). His book aims at "studying S-21 and its archive on their own terms . . . particularly as a means of entering the collective mentality of the Khmer Rouge and also as a way of coming to grips with a frightening, heavily documented institution" (p. ix). . . .

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