Non-fiction — Cambodia
History, essays, biography, and ideas
8 books on this shelf
Cambodian Linguistics, Literature and History: Collected Articles
Judith M. Jacob (1929-2011) was one of the twentieth century's foremost Western scholars of the Khmer language, teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London for most of her career and producing the standard English-Khmer dictionary and reference grammar still used by students today. This 1993 volume gathers her scattered academic articles into a single collected edition spanning three of her core specialties: Khmer linguistics (grammar, vocabulary, and the structure of the language), Khmer literature (including her close studies of classical verse narratives and court literature), and Cambodian history and social conditions as reflected in written sources. Because Jacob worked directly with original Khmer-language manuscripts and inscriptions rather than secondary translations, the collection is considered a foundational reference for anyone doing serious research into pre-modern Cambodian textual culture. It sits at the intersection of philology and history, showing how the Khmer language itself changed across centuries of Angkorian and post-Angkorian Cambodia. Republished as a bound collection specifically so later scholars would not have to hunt down her individual journal articles piecemeal.
The Land and People of Cambodia
Published in 1972 as part of Lippincott's long-running "Portraits of the Nations" series for general readers, this is an early general-audience book by David P. Chandler, the Australian historian who would go on to become the most widely read Western scholar of Cambodian history, later writing the standard academic text "A History of Cambodia" and influential studies of the Khmer Rouge period. Per its own publisher description, the book is "an introduction to the geography, people, history, religion, and causes of the recent unrest of Cambodia" — written at the moment the country was sliding into the civil war that followed the 1970 coup against Prince Sihanouk, which makes it a historically interesting snapshot of how Cambodia was being explained to English-language readers just before the Khmer Rouge era that would define the country's twentieth-century reputation abroad. As an accessible primer rather than a specialist monograph, it covers Cambodia's Buddhist religious life, its people, and its Angkorian and colonial-era history in plain language.
Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2019, this scholarly study examines the Mekong Delta plains during the eighteenth century — territory long known in Khmer history as the Lower Mekong / Khmer Krom region before it came under Nguyen Vietnamese control. Per the publisher's own description, the book draws on Vietnamese and Chinese sources to show "the ways in which two leading statesmen mobilized literature to effect the transformation of the frontier region," at a time when multiple migratory groups with competing political ambitions — including Khmer, Vietnamese, and Chinese settler communities — converged on the delta. Author Claudine Ang is a historian specializing in early modern Southeast Asia. Because the book treats the Mekong Delta as a genuinely cross-border frontier rather than a purely Vietnamese story, it is directly relevant to Cambodian history: this delta region is the same territory Khmer sources call Kampuchea Krom, and the book's account of how literature and statecraft were used to remake the frontier speaks to the deeper, contested history of Cambodia's southern borderlands.
Pol Pot's Cambodia
Part of a young-adult nonfiction history series, this 2009 book by Matthew Scott Weltig covers, per its own publisher description, "the nation of Cambodia under the rule of Pol Pot, a Communist revolutionary who attained power in 1975 after years of fighting." It is aimed at introducing students and general readers to the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979), one of the most consequential and painful chapters of twentieth-century Cambodian history, when the Communist Party of Kampuchea under Pol Pot emptied cities, abolished currency and private property, and carried out the mass killings and forced-labor policies now remembered as the Cambodian genocide. As an entry-level history title, it is written to make this period comprehensible to readers encountering Cambodian history for the first time, situating Pol Pot's rise within the broader context of the Vietnam War era and Cambodia's 1970 coup and subsequent civil war. Its presence in library and school collections has made it one of the more widely circulated English-language introductions to this era for younger readers.
Cambodia (Cultures of the World)
This 2017 edition is part of Marshall Cavendish's long-running "Cultures of the World" reference series, a 144-page country-profile volume by Sean Sheehan covering Cambodia's geography, history, government, economy, and daily cultural life for school and library readers. The "Cultures of the World" series is a well-established educational reference format used across hundreds of country titles, structured to give students a compact, illustrated overview of a nation's people and customs rather than a narrative history. This edition situates Cambodia within its Southeast Asian context, covering the legacy of the Angkor era, French colonial rule, the Khmer Rouge period, and the country's postwar recovery and modern Buddhist-majority society, alongside everyday topics like food, festivals, and family life. As a reference title rather than a work of original scholarship, its value lies in making Cambodia's culture and history digestible for a young or general-interest audience through a standardized, comparative format shared with the series' many other country volumes.
Cambodia
A 2019 children's nonfiction country profile of Cambodia by Alicia Z. Klepeis, a working author of educational nonfiction for young readers covering geography, wildlife, and world cultures across multiple series. This title follows the standard country-profile format aimed at school-age readers, introducing Cambodia's location in Southeast Asia, its people, and core facts about its history and daily life, including its Buddhist-majority culture and its Angkorian heritage centered on Angkor Wat. As with most titles in this genre, the book is built to give young readers a first, accessible point of contact with Cambodia rather than deep historical analysis, typically pairing short chapters with photographs and infographics to hold the interest of school-age audiences doing country-report research. Its presence in library catalogs alongside other Klepeis country titles reflects the ongoing demand for updated, age-appropriate nonfiction material on Southeast Asian nations for classroom and library use.
Cambodia in Pictures
Part of Lerner Publications' long-running "Visual Geography Series," this 2004 volume by Margaret J. Goldstein uses a photograph-led format to introduce Cambodia's land, history, government, people, and economy to school-age readers. The Visual Geography Series is built around the idea that a heavily illustrated, photo-forward layout communicates a country's character faster than dense prose for younger audiences, and Cambodia's edition covers its Southeast Asian geography, the legacy of the Khmer Empire and Angkor Wat, the twentieth-century upheavals of the Khmer Rouge era, and the country's postwar rebuilding. As with the rest of the series, its purpose is educational reference rather than narrative storytelling — a first stop for students researching Cambodia for a school report, structured to be revisited chapter by chapter rather than read cover to cover.
The People of Cambodia
Published in 1997, this children's nonfiction title by Dolly Brittan is described by its own publisher summary as a book that "introduces the history, religion, language and culture of Cambodia." Cataloged under the Dewey classification for Cambodia and shelved as juvenile literature, it belongs to the genre of world-cultures readers that were common in American school and public libraries through the 1990s, giving students a compact overview of a nation's people rather than a specialist history. For Cambodia specifically, a book published in this period sits close to the country's postwar recovery years — well after the end of the Khmer Rouge era in 1979 and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, and around the time of the UN-supervised transition and 1993 elections that restored a constitutional monarchy — making it a snapshot of how Cambodia's culture and people were being introduced to young Western readers as the country was still actively rebuilding.