Survival in the Killing Fields
For his role as the journalist Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields (1984), Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience, won an OscarR. In playing the part, he drew on his own tormented life as a war slave during the Cambodian civil war, which makes the agony seen in the film seem mild. Funded and fueled by Chinese Communists, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge were a gang of brutal thugs who dispossessed, robbed, raped, tortured, and murdered so many of their countrymen/women that somewhere between a third and a half of the population was decimated. Ngor himself was tortured three times and lost a finger for calling his wife "sweet." Before each of the three tortures, the listener is warned that it will be violent, but this highly compelling account has few equals among stories of cruel, sadistic oppression masquerading as ideology and should be heard in full by anyone who cares about freedom. Unlike most programs written with a collaborator, the narrative voice here is distinct and wholly convincing, and British actor Crawford Logan's authoritative reading is terrifyingly real. This is a very demanding program, but it is of such high merit and rare importance that it deserves a place in every collection. Highly recommended.?Peter Josyph, New YorkCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theAudio Cassetteedition.