Sydney H. SchanbergBesprekingen

Important Journalism at the Time

"The Death and Life of Dith Pran" and Schanberg's reporting helped introduce America to the Cambodian Genocide. Because of that, this book is of historical and literary significance. However, being published in a newspaper just a year after the Cambodian Genocide ended, there was not much time for Schanberg or anyone else to do much research into the matter. As such, this book is mostly about Schanberg's despondency after losing his friend Dith Pran for four years. The book also covers what happened to Pran during the Genocide, albeit briefly and without much detail. The book is less than 80 pages.

Since being published, numerous memoirs and studies about the Cambodian Genocide have replaced the importance of "The Death and Life of Dith Pran." There is a wealth of new scholarly information, journalism, and biography from which readers can pull information from besides this book. Nevertheless, "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" was important from a cultural perspective.

Selected articles from Pulitzer prize winning journalist Sydney Schanberg, particularly known for highlighting the atrocities and quite frankly shocking external political manipulations in Cambodia that was being overshadowed by the Vietnam war. His most famous story, included here was also the basis for the superb film The Killing Fields (One of my favourite films, highly recommended).

It’s a hard book to review. Whilst a plea from a war reporter for peace, it could also be said to be too bitty and isn’t an book to be read straight through. It covers the Cambodia genocide, the horrendous birth of Bangladesh, Vietnam war, thoughts on Iraq and research into Vietnam POWs left behind and denied. Schanberg writes in a beautifully clear and passionate way. Context is provided, the selected articles show a timeline (in particular the Cambodia pieces) and it’s very easy to gain insight. It’s not just historical reportage though there are essays on language of war (the horrors hidden by “collateral damage”) and the battle between governments & their reporters and the damage to the "truth" that are fascinating.

Why I read it though, was for the Cambodian section and the most famous story. It’s worth the price of admission alone.

It’s a hard story to summarise, it deals with the fall of country into horror, the forced march of a population from towns and cities into the countryside and the starvation that follows, the culling of all intellectuals (teachers, writers, doctors), the fields of mass murder. It is a huge story made personal. It is a story of hope and friendship, of one who has crippling survivors guilt for failing to save his friend and the other who survives against huge odds. A story of journalism and war, clash of cultures. It’s a short piece that says so many things.

It is hard to review because of the impact it made when I was young, so formative and now so familiar. I cannot believe though that this is not worth reading to this unfamiliar with the story, that you won’t gain something.

Recommended: Though it’s very hard to find outside of a e-book so perhaps just track down the film. I guarantee its worth it.

Brilliant

Schanberg was a journalist for the New York Times covering the war in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over the country. The Killing fields, as book & film, is a very powerful story of friendship and survival and is the story of Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist. Pran was left behind when all the foreigners were ejected from Cambodia and lived in the then closed Khmer Rouge regime as Pol Pot enacted his Year 0 social experiment on a grand scale. I finished this on the bus on the way to Phnom Penh and visiting S-21 and the Killing Fields with it so fresh in my mind was an experience I don’t think I’ll ever forget. However it doesn’t need to be read in situ, it is a brilliant book full of stirring writing and if you haven’t seen the film I thoroughly recommend it as it is a very good adaptation. This book adds some of Schanberg’s other war journalism in Vietnam & Bangladesh as well as his coverage of MIA US servicemen left behind by the US government and his thoughts on the war in Iraq. The message of the book is that war is never clinical, that “collateral damage” is a sanitisation of murder and that the abstraction of making decisions way behind the front lines contributes to atrocity.

Overall – Powerfully intelligent writing on the subject of war. Highly recommended. Have a box of tissues to hand when reading though.½

This is the book version of the long article Schanberg wrote about his colleague and friend Dith Pran after Dith's escape from Cambodia. It is the basis for The Killing Fields, but is interesting in its own right as a brief memoir that lightly touches upon the agony of having privilege in circumstances where your loved ones do not. Schanberg's prose is spare and to the point; he's no great stylist, but the simplicity of the writing serves to convey immediacy and urgency. I recommend reading this first, watching the film, then watching or reading Gray's Swimming to Cambodia.

An excellent read that covers not only the times this book was written but focuses on the indivduals (Schamberg, Pran, other journalists) that were desparate to keep telling the world what was going on this region. There are lots of poigniant moments in the book but two stood out for me: 1) trying to get Pran a fake passport so he wouldn't be left behind; 2) Pran being discovered as an intellectual by the KR because he was teaching the kids of an officer a few French phrases. Moments like these pushed Pran further and further away from his family (who managed to get out and set up life in the US) and deeper and deeper into the horror that was SE Asia at the time. One thing that always amazes me about Pran afterwards was his balance, some (westerners) would have caved or be forever poisoned with a need for revenge but Pran was full of forgiveness. Pretty amazing. The movie si a good rental too, though the book will give you more insight into some of hte details the movie didn't go into.