100 Books Like First They Killed My Father

This book gave me a world I'd barely known about, a villain who personified evil and a cast of characters from the famous (but murderous) explorer Henry Morton Stanley to uncelebrated people of conscience who fought Leopold's monstrous scheme.

So it's a fabulous story, but along the way, it also taught me a great deal about the history of Africa, a continent about which we Americans know so little.

I love this book because of Katniss Everdeen's depth. She’s not just another “kickass hottie”, she’s complex, with a powerful character arc driven by a deep sense of responsibility.

The book’s commentary on mental health and Katniss' parentification resonated with me personally. The story world of all the districts and President Snow's iron grip on them is well-drawn and has parallels to our own, too. 

Although I love a book that takes you traveling to the past or to foreign lands, sometimes I want to jump into the shoes of a contemporary character and understand their world. This book does just that. 

Starr Carter is a black teenager who lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite, mostly white private school. Starr manages to code-switch between her two lives until her childhood friend is shot by the police. 

If you like books about social justice and characters who stand up for what they believe, this is a fantastic read. 

For young readers of poetry, this is an excellent read. It’s set in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Eras, and it truly is an age-defining book. I loved the memoir aspect of it, and I found myself caring not only about each word in this book but every soul. 

I’m a huge admirer of the late Cambodian American author Anthony Veasna So—he had an eye for the perfect, defining detail. In his debut short-story collection, published after his death, he bore witness to his beloved Khmer diaspora community’s loves and losses, traumas and triumphs—somehow balancing bitter wit and humanity as he tackled the Big Questions: How do you remake a life after witnessing the worst horrors imaginable? How can the next generation truly understand what their elders endured?

So was an extraordinary talent—what a tragedy that he died so young. Thankfully, he left the world this splendid document of his generation’s experience of growing up as exiles in the shadow of genocide. Reading these stories as Chantha and I worked on her memoir helped us connect the parallel threads of what it was like for those who left Cambodia in the 1970s and made new lives abroad and for… show more.

Elizabeth Becker’s sweeping account of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime was essential reading for me as I struggled to understand what befell Cambodia in the 1970s-90s. A foreign correspondent in Cambodia starting in 1973, Becker witnessed some of Cambodia’s disasters firsthand and interviewed scores of survivors and perpetrators, including Pol Pot himself, at great personal risk.

This book adds vital context from the French colonial era, Pol Pot’s political education in Paris, U.S. bombing campaigns, and Lon Nol’s 1970 coup before “Pol Pot Time” (as Cambodians call the Khmer Rouge era) to the aftermath: Vietnam’s invasion and occupation, refugee camps and refugee policy in the West, the peace process, and Cambodia’s first postwar elections. I turned to Becker’s book again and again to put Chantha’s memories into historical context and (occasionally) inform our explanatory footnotes.

I loved Vaddey Ratner’s debut novel, which offers another heart-wrenching child’s-eye view of life under the Khmer Rouge. Raami, her seven-year-old protagonist, is marched out of Phnom Penh in April 1975 with her family, who is of royal stock and, therefore, in extreme peril.

Raami details the horror and cruelty she endures as the regime becomes ever more paranoid and murderous. She fights to retain vestiges of her earlier self, recalling her favorite myths and tales from Cambodian folklore—in this, I saw a parallel with how Chantha turns to her food memories and recipes to remember who she was before the disasters began. Ratner, a Khmer Rouge survivor, writes beautifully of endurance, survival, and hope amidst horror, and like Ung, she’s an important voice for Cambodian survivors, the conscience of a generation. 

To understand Cambodia, I needed to taste its flavors. Nhum (which means “eat” in Khmer) was a great way for me to learn more about Khmer cuisine between trips to Cambodia. Nhum is a beautifully designed cookbook—and it’s a historical document meant to help preserve Cambodian foodways, which were nearly wiped out by the Khmer Rouge’s campaign of murder, starvation, and cultural erasure.

Rotanak—known as “Chef Nak” to her fans—has become a celebrity in Cambodia, with two Cambodian cookbooks, a homestay/cooking lesson business in Phnom Penh, and a social media video series featuring her traveling the countryside, asking elders to share their recipes. The “Ingredients” section alone is a masterclass on what you’ll find in Cambodian gardens, pantries, and kitchens and how and why to use it.

Chantha and I met and cooked with Chef Nak a few years ago, and we admire her work preserving traditional recipes. I hope… show more.

Filmmaker Rithy Panh does not like the word trauma. He prefers to describe the after-effects of what happened to his Cambodian family as “an unending desolation.” Ever since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979 and he survived as a teenager, he has not stopped thinking about his family and trying to understand Comrade Duch, a man Rithy regards as “The Commandant of the Killing Fields." Mao and Stalin, Nazism and the Nurenberg Trials, and The Hague all hover at the edges of Rithy’s consciousness. He describes dispossession; dehumanization beginning with the annulment of names; demonization of education and traditional notions of culture; deportation;  slow starvation; corruption; terror; torture and language itself. Rithy Panh is a documentary filmmaker and reading The Elimination is an act of witness by both writer and reader. 

Cambodia, Joel Brinkley writes, is the most dangerous country in the world. The first one falls in love with it, then it breaks one’s heart. Cambodia’s Curse is a book of two tales. Brinkley’s retelling of the war years is a little revisionist but the chapters on the post-war reconstruction, the dirty politics, the lack of opportunities for ordinary people, and the venality of the government that remains in place to this day rightly and masterfully lay the blame for countless missed opportunities to create a more equitable society both into the hands of the international community’s attempts to create ‘democracy’ and Hun Sen’s regime.