When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

Like Pin Yathay's book 'Stay alive, my son', it contains an excellent first-hand account of the disorderly evacuation of Phnom Penh after the Red Khmer victory in the civil war.
After the evacuation, everybody, from the elderly to the very young, was forced to participate in a totalitarian experiment (no money, no private property, no family bonds, total control, spying on everybody), which was based on monoculture: rice.
The main ideological aim was equality at any cost, not freedom, except naturally for the members of Angkar (the Organization) themselves. The whole system resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger, exhaustion, torture and summary executions of 'enemies' of the system. A terrible shame for humanity and for the ideologically pure left.

Chanrithy Him's book tells also the story of the aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia: refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines.
She also indicates discreetly that the main reason for the Red Khmer regime in Cambodia were the illegal US bombardments of the Cambodian border with Vietnam, which turned the main part of the Cambodian peasantry in the arms of the Red Khmer.

Apart from its uncontested historical value, this book should be read as a warning against the madness of pure ideologists, who, once in power, accept without the slightest remorse millions of human casualties to implement their maniacal policies.

For a more political (national and international), economical and social analysis of the Cambodian history and the Red Khmer regime, I recommend the works of David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan, as well as William Shawcross's 'Sideshow'.