© Columbia University Press
Facing Death in Cambodia
March, 2005
Cloth, 280 pages, 25 photos
ISBN: 978-0-231-12052-4
$36.00
/ £25.00
"Maguire's interviews...are fascinating in their treatment of death and accountability...This is a gripping and well-written account." — Library Journal
"Maguire is able to put a bit of a human face on all these events." — the complete review
"Places in context the UN's efforts this year to establish an international tribunal on the Cambodian tragedy." — Booklist
"Concise, impassioned and at all times aware of the 'hallowness' of his words when compared to the survirors' own experiences, Maguire leaves readers mute." — Ian Neubauer, The Cambodia Daily
"Maguire's book is deftly written...The book is a sober, clear-eyed look at the questions surrounding the probable tribunal." — Steve Hirsch, Phnom Penh Post
"Facing Death in Cambodia is a scholarly, yet personal narrative of his own research." — John Ryle, Financial Times
"Maguire succeeds in illuminating the mindset of victims and perpetrators alike." — D. Gordon Longmuir, Pacific Affairs
"Peter Maguire has taken an honest look at Cambodian society. He has no agenda other than to make us examine ourselves. Maguire does not cry with us over our past; instead, what he shows us could help us move beyond being mere survivors and take a larger part in our own futures." — Youk Chhang, Director, Documentation Center of Cambodia
"Shattering. You think you know what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge—the broad facts, at least. But genocide has, always, an all-important context, which includes a fateful run-up and a massively complex aftermath, and in Peter Maguire's scrupulous account it is the cynicism of nearly every main player in Cambodia's national nightmare that most stunned me. The pathological cruelty of Pol Pot's regime is also fully captured, to be sure, through survivor interviews and the famous, utterly eerie photographs from Tuol Sleng prison. This is not history as culled from libraries. It is history as personal quest, with Maguire chasing his story wherever it takes him--to Vietnam, to East Germany—and making no bones about his desire to undo the final insult of impunity with unblinking accountability." — William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country
"Peter Maguire takes us into a dark period of world history, when a blinkered Utopian regime presided over the deaths of nearly two million of its own people. In this adventurous, thoughtful study, he draws us inexorably into the heat, squalor and magnetism of Cambodia as he confronts such troubling issues as trauma, genocide and the remote possibility of justice." — David Chandler, author of Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
"Intrepid and unfettered, Peter Maguire goes where most fear to tread, into the innards of Cambodia's killing machine, to report the true—and largely overlooked—story of what happened to a country ripped asunder between US and international interests and one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. The result, quite apart from the highly readable adventure of Maguire's own journey, is righteous rage: a stinging indictment of not only the murderous Khmer Rouge, but the machinations of the United Nations and so-called 'international community'. This is a book of its time, about the zeitgeist, with resonance everywhere in a troubled world, far beyond the Cambodia Maguire knows better than any other." — Ed Vulliamy, Facing Death in Cambodia