Kerr offers a memoir of his experiences as an American doctor traveling in Cambodia and discussing the country’s violent past with people there.

In this nonfiction book, the author describes his time in Cambodia in the early 2000s, during which he conducted many interviews with everyday people connected to the long-term trauma arising from Pol Pot’s 1970s regime. For example, he spoke with Youk Chhang, the co-founder of Cambodia's Documentation Center, who told horrific stories of his torture under the dictatorship and reminded Kerr that his case was commonplace: “We must remember that every single person in the country was in one way or another victimized by the Khmer Rouge,” he told the author. “Every family in Cambodia has at least one victim.” Kerr also encountered some people who were part of that regime. Along the way, he also did a fair amount of reading on his subject, including books such as Ho Chi Minh (2000) by William J. Duiker, and this tendency sometimes worried his hosts: “In Cambodia, if read too much, must kill,” one said. He also tells of how, when he traveled from village to village with friends via motorcycle, little children yelled “Hello! Hello! Hello!” and sometimes created obstacles: “The villages and rice paddies were beautiful, but I was on the lookout for people trying to throw a small pig or duck in front of me.” This deft combination of the serious and the comic, the political and the personal, runs through the book and lifts it above similar memoirs. Kerr blends a large amount of Cambodian history into his accounts of his own adventures, and he remembers to provide readers with generous amounts of atmosphere along the way: “Torrential rain and lightning heralded the beginning of the monsoon as I landed at Phnom Penh’s Ponchetong International Airport,” he writes at one point, and such moments give his narrative a pleasing readability amid grim subject matter.

A vivid, gripping remembrance of a traumatized nation.