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3.5 

The Gate

By Francois Bizot
The Gate by Francois Bizot digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border.

Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.

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The Gate Reviews

3.5
“An excellent book written by the experiences and painted by the horrors Bizot witnessed before and after the Khmer Rouge came to power. The book shows an outsider who disguised himself really well as an insider detained and tortured by the Khmer Rouge and how the titular "gate" separated freedom from misery and death in 1970s Cambodia”

About Francois Bizot

Francois Bizot is an ethnologist who has spent the greater part of his career studying Buddhism. He is the Director of Studies at Ecole Pratique des Hautes-etudes and holds the chair in Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne. He lives in Paris.

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