SBR: My luck with reading histories continued as I started reading A History of Cambodia by David P. Chandler. Like A Brief History of France by Cecil Jenkins that I read earlier, this book about Cambodia was just suitable for my purpose. The purpose was to get an overall introduction to the history of the country in a readable language and within a reasonable length of the text. I should have read it before our Cambodia trip a year and a half ago. But we acquired this book only in Cambodia and after returning back, it kept getting pushed down the to-read pile. But it resurfaced finally, and I am glad it did. Like other books of this type, this also devotes a large amount of space to modern history. But in Cambodia’s case, I am not complaining, because it is a history that is still playing out and it helped put a lot of what we saw there in context.

To read or not to read: Yes – as a good starting point for or as a quick overview of Cambodian history.