Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge

A Westerner who suffered under the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia between 1975 and 1980, Picq offers terrifying testimony on the ability of a small group of fanatics to enslave and dehumanize an entire society. The French author, formerly married to a Cambodian, writes that she was resented as a member of a former colonial ruling presence and despised elite. After four years of working as a recruit in Khmer Rouge offices and in a camp in deserted Phnom Penh, the pregnant Picq and her two daughters were subjected to a 23-day forced march to the Thai border, described in exhaustive, grim detail, during which she suffered the birth and death of a son. The ordeal ended when the author and her daughters were given refuge in the Cambodian embassy in Peking. After the breakup of her marriage, Picq returned, with her children, to France. ( July )