Men, women and children are arrested on the basis of rumor, rounded up in trucks and hauled, without trial, to prison, where they are asked to give information about crimes of which they know nothing. As prisoners, they are beaten with sticks, tortured with electric wires, burned with cigarettes, forced to eat excrement. An interrogator pulls out his captive's fingernails until the prisoner manages to piece together a fiction that incriminates himself. The prisoner is then taken outside, bludgeoned to death with an ox-cart axle and tipped into a mass grave.
Although this sensationalized telling is true in its detailing of a horrific Cambodian prison, it is of little value -- it serves only to shock and repulse, emotions that trigger our flight instincts.
In "Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison," David Chandler's unsensational, restrained and even introspective book, he does the opposite: He unflinchingly examines the horror without making it a horror show.