Sydney Schanberg Returns to the Killing Fields

It’s been out since March, but we wanted to take a moment to note the new book by former Village Voice staff writer Sydney Schanberg. Beyond the Killing Fields (Potomac Books, 228 pp., $27.50) anthologizes 40 pieces from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer’s career, primarily his war-reporting. Schanberg’s articles track the developments in Cambodia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, during the upheaval in the 1970s in all those lands. The book also reprints some of Schanberg’s commentary, including pieces he wrote for the Voice.

Explaining his reasons for republishing the material, Schanberg writes in his intro: “We Americans are notoriously deficient about taking lessons from our own history. So perhaps this book will remind people what war is really like. Slaughter is no less bestial now than it has been through recorded history.”