The Communist Party of Cambodia (CPK), better known as the Khmer Rouge, was the last self-declared Communist Party to seize power in the twentieth century. Ruling for less than four years, from April 1975 to early 1979, the party’s reign became infamous for violence and cruelty, its name synonymous with murder and repression. Some scholars hold the Cambodian Communists and their leader, Pol Pot, responsible for the death of almost a quarter of the country’s population.

But what really happened in Democratic Kampuchea (DK), as the Khmer Rouge renamed the country, is often shrouded in myths. From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, and Labor Under the Khmer Rouge is geographer James A. Tyner’s attempt to explain the roots of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.

While other writings on the Kampuchea period have blamed its violence on the supposed “totalitarian aspects” of attempts to create a more equal society — or on either the personalities of CPK leaders or Cambodian and Buddhist culture — Tyner situates the CPK regime in its social and economic context. Rice Fields to Killings Fields aims to critically apply Marxist concepts to a regime that claimed to be Marxist. Tyner focuses on the CPK’s economic policy as providing the “base” for the DK regime, allowing him to dispel several myths about the Khmer Rouge. But in the end, the book is unable to fully explain the exceptional violence of the regime.