The Gate
Books / Paperback
Books › History › United States › General
ISBN: 037572723X / Publisher: Vintage, January 2004
An ethnologist describes his sojourn in rural Cambodia in 1971 as a scholar of Khmer pottery and Buddhism, his arrest and captivity by the Khmer Rouge as genocide swept through the country, his relationship with his captor, his role during the escape from the doomed capital of Phnom Penh, and other memories of the "killing fields" of Cambodia. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.
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In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border. Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
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