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.