Nic Dunlop

Dunlop's biography humanizes Comrade Duch without diminishing the horrifying impact of his actions. He illuminates some of the internal politics that make the Khmer Rouge's contradictory policies so confusing.

Though the account is engrossing, some of the writing is uneven and awkward. Some sentences don't seem to relate to their contexts. He repeats himself. He assumes that the reader knows the basic history of Cambodia, so there are gaps that detract from the reader's ability to follow the narrative easily.

Dunlap is ambivalent about photography, finding it distancing and aesthiticizing of suffering, yet it was a photograph that moved and motivated him to conduct this investigation. Similarly, he wants people to visit the Toul Sleng prison museum, but also denounces it as a "commercial enterprise" (p. 226). His ambivalence doesn't trouble me, but he frequently gives strong, contradictory opinions without developing the relationship between these points of view.

Dunlap's resources are good, but he does not seem to be aware of Vann Nath's A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 Prison.… (altro)