Pol Pot and his communists took control of Cambodia in April 1975 and proceeded to impose on that country doctrines they had picked up when students in 1950s Paris. Their regime lasted until January 1979, when a Vietnamese army occupied the nation's capital after a brief war. The forty-five months that elapsed between these two... Read More

Though he wrote, edited or translated more than forty books altogether, Patrick O'Brian's fame rests on twenty historical novels about the Royal Navy, set in the time of the wars against Napoleon. The novels all feature the bluff, competent sea captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship's surgeon, the brilliant but eccentric Stephen Maturin.... Read More

Another memoir about growing up in Communist China? There are enough of these now to form a well-established genre, from Tung Chi-ping's The Thought Revolution (1967) and Ken Ling's Red Guard (1972) through Liang Heng's Son of the Revolution (1983) to Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) with many, many others in between and since. Surely... Read More