Good reading

1. "The Quiet American," by Graham Greene.
2. "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution," by Elizabeth Becker. This masterly account of that dreadful period finds dark strains in Cambodian history that prefigure Pol Pot. But it indicts the U.S. and China almost equally for a horror that was not inevitable.
3. "Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja," by Emit Gilboa. This short (but still a little padded) book of memoir/reportage is good about Hun Sen's post-Pol Pot thuggery and about the farang "flotsam" that washed up in Phnom Penh just after all the wars were over.
4. A wonderfully smart and poignant essay by Peace Corps old girl (but much younger than a lot of us) Darcy Meijer, about her teaching years ago in Gabon and then two decades later in Ho Chi Minh City. It's online on John Coyne's indispensible PeaceCorpsWriters.org at http://peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2006/0611/611wr-meijer.htm.

Incidentally, all of the above, except the online essay, are Chinese-mafia cheap knockoff copies we bought in Cambodia or Vietnam. Legitimate editions of these books were nowhere to be found. I did ask a bookstore clerk in Siem Reap if Elizabeth Becker would be receiving royalties on my purchase of her book, but the fellow pretended not to understand my question.