Pol Pot

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short, 449 pages

When the Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen in 1975, no one - not even the revolutionaries themselves - knew exactly what would happen next.  Indeed, at that time the identity of the communists' ultimate leader was unknown to any outside of their own innermost circle.  Saloth Sar, who took the revolutionary name Pol Pot, had been content to be a face in the crowd of Khmer Rouge officials, but he now held the power of life and death over seven million people.  For at least a fifth of that population, that power would be death.

Jacob Burckhardt famously declared that "the essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity."  It may be significant, then, that Pol Pot's brother-in-law once described him as having "a very simplistic vision of things."  It is not a mistake that Philip Short repeats in his study of the Cambodian dictator, rather, he provides detailed intersecting accounts of the breakdown of Cambodian politics, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the making of the man Pol Pot.  Unfortunately, this sometimes suggests obfuscation rather than accuracy, as the author seems to be at pains to highlight just about any negative influence on the Khmer Rouge other than progressive dogma, primarily blaming various elements of the Khmer national character for the regime's policies - an absurd explanation given the poverty of the Khmer precedents when contrasted with the rich global pattern of Marxist mass murder.  It is distasteful for other reasons as well, as Short confesses when he notes that his description of the Khmer as a uniquely lazy people "will raise hackles."

Dark Night in Aurora

A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings by William H Reid, 269 pages

On July 19th, 2012, James Holmes wrote "Embraced the hatred, a dark k/night rises" in the notebook he had been keeping for the past few months.  By this time Holmes' apartment was cluttered with weapons, bombs, and booby-traps, some genuinely dangerous and others merely meant to look dangerous, and similarly his notebook contained a combination of threat and pretense.  When, several hours later, Holmes surrendered to police after opening fire on the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring dozens more, it became the labor of experts to separate the two - explosives specialists to disarm the trapped apartment, psychological experts to untangle his true thoughts and motivations.  One of these latter was forensic psychologist William Reid, and this book presents his process and conclusions.

More often than not, mass murderers do not survive their rampages - indeed, self-destruction is often their end goal.  Yet Holmes' survival is, from the standpoint of understanding, a mixed blessing, since human beings generally, and criminals especially, tend to be dishonest when accounting for their own past actions.  Thankfully, as might be expected given his professional background, Reid is well aware of this.  Unfortunately, his profession does not include some of the skills of novelists and journalists, so that his account, while clear, is not particularly compelling.  Nor does he have much in the way of answers - in his view, Holmes' actions were influenced but not determined by his very real mental health issues.  He does, however, provide an interesting inside look at how the legal system adjudicates oftentimes competing claims of culpability and mental illness.

Killing Wind

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution by Tan Hecheng, translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, 464 pages

Jiang Xiaochu was a 22 year old engineering student when the Cultural Revolution began in Hunan.  As his father, a former teacher, had been censured for supposedly holding counterrevolutionary views and relegated to farm labor several years earlier, the entire Jiang family were considered suspect "black elements".  Fearing for his safety as turmoil enveloped the university, Xiaochu returned to his native town.  Ever since his father's censure, the Jiang family had devoted themselves to Mao Zedong Thought, and he believed that their conspicuous loyalty would persuade their neighbors to overlook their past.  So strong was his faith that when his father and brother were arrested, Xiaochu went to the local authorities to argue for their release.  He was arrested as well, and killed beside them.  His mother and sister were gang-raped by the executioners, but survived to tell their story to investigators - including journalist Tan Hecheng - two decades later.  Tan's original article chronicling the investigation was censored by China's Communist authorities, but became the germ for his exhaustive study, The Killing Wind, where the story of Jiang Xiaochu and his family joins the stories of nearly 5000 other victims of the Cultural Revolution in the small county of Daoxian.

Stalin is famously supposed to have said, "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."  The number of people killed in the Cultural Revolution is unknown, but almost certainly over a million, and possibly several millions.  Tan Hecheng, chronicling the violence in a single county, manages to combine the statistics with personal stories that preserve the tragic, human scale.  Unfortunately, the sheer scale and disorder of the killing wind inevitably makes the narrative difficult to follow at times.  Tan intended his report as a reckoning with history, insisting that the horrors committed cannot - must not - be forgotten, not only out of a sense of justice for the victims and survivors, but also due to a commitment to the truth.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, where many Americans increasingly regard their political opponents as irredeemable deplorables against whom violence is acceptable, Tan Hecheng's study of how what Che Guevara famously described as the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines" is fostered and exploited is as timely as it is powerful.

The Masked Truth

The Masked Truth by Kelley Armstrong, 340 pages

“Tricked by a former friend into canceling a date and filling in as a babysitter, teenage Riley could never imagine the fear that now haunts her. A witness to the double murder of the parents of her young charge, Riley can't shake her memories of that evening, especially since she was little help to the police investigators. She agrees to attend a therapy weekend, only for terror to intrude again when kidnappers break into the building and murder both counselors and teen attendees.”  This was a crazily convoluted mystery and I loved it.  It was terrifying pretty much from beginning to end, because the end game was hidden well enough that it was hard to figure out much before the characters do.  This is definitely a good choice for teens that like thrillers