While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing killing fields-rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls.

Young Sichan Siv-a target since he was a university graduate-was told by his mother to run and never give up hope Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death-or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, Welcome to Thailand.

He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.

In the 1960s and '70s, Cambodia's dictator Pol Pot ordered the educated and intellectual of the population to be imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered. Young Siv was captured and put to work in a slave labor camp. He relates how he escaped certain death by fleeing the country for Thailand.

While the United States battled Vietnamese Communists in the 1960s and 1970s, in neighboring Cambodia dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge declared war on their own people, enslaving and slaughtering anybody who disagreed with them. Sichan Siv knew he would soon be a target--ending up, perhaps, as one of the millions of anonymous human skeletons buried in his nation's Killing Fields--so he heeded his mother's pleas and ran. Captured and forced to perform slave labor, Siv feared that he'd be worked to death or killed. It was only a matter of time. But he never abandoned hope or his improbable dream of freedom--a dream that liberated him, astonishingly, from his brutal captors and ultimately led him to the United States, where he later became a senior White House aide.

Golden Bones is an extraordinary story of almost unimaginable hardship and remarkable courage by a survivor whose triumph over terror and adversity serves as a shining inspiration to us all.