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.