Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land.

• Author: Ear, Sophal
• Position: Book review

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. By Joel Brinkley. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2011. Hardcover: 416pp.

This is a heartbreaking book to review because so much of it is excellent reportage (for example, the Preface and Chapters 2 to 16) while other parts of it lapse into an ugly Orientalist mould (e.g. the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 17 and the Epilogue). The author, Joel Brinkley, is a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting on Cambodia in 1979 for the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky. It often reads breezily like a very long magazine article, pockmarked with factual blunders (many errors--such as a reference to a non-existent national oil company on page 347 or implying China invaded Vietnam in 1989 on page 62--have already been uncovered by other reviewers: Douglas Gillison for Time, 11 April 2011; Elizabeth Becker for the San Francisco Chronicle, 17 April 2011; Sebastian Strangio for Asia Times, 13 May 2011; Geoffrey Cain for The Wall Street Journal, 19 May 2011; and Eng Kok-Thay for The Truth, June 2011). Reading Cambodia's Curse, one cannot help but feel that Brinkley's curmudgeonly style and dry commentary (often at the expense of his subject, the Cambodian people, though not always--he actually uses the word "Chinaman" on page 19 to describe Zhou Daguan a Chinese chronicler who visited in the thirteenth century) come across as arrogant and detached.

His dependent variable is the failure of Cambodia to develop and democratize, and while he marshals several perfectly valid independent variables like impunity, domestic violence, deforestation, narcotics, corruption, elections, hunger, education, health, etc. he ultimately settles rather bafflingly on one that is least convincing: Cambodians are just cursed by a millennium of history and culture, and the Killing Fields of 1975 to 1979 only made it worse. Needless to say, this argument has won him few friends among Cambodia scholars and Cambodians because what he has essentially done is to insult everyone he has ever come in contact with while writing this book.

On the positive side, Brinkley provides some quality reporting and condenses historical and political events into a readable format for most audiences, which reflects his strength as a journalist. All the while, he manages to capture the political tension of many events, such as the United Nations-organized election in 1993 and power struggles among Hun Sen, Prince...