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.
Why it matters to Cambodia: Written by the historian who later became the definitive English-language authority on Cambodia, this early primer is a useful time-capsule of how the country was introduced to outside readers right before the Khmer Rouge years reshaped its history.