Escape from Camp 14

I find it really hard to review this book. I loved this book when I read it. It was my favorite book for the longest time because of how powerful it was and I was recommending it to everyone to shed some light on the atrocities committed in North Korean prison camps. However, now, after knowing that large elements of Donghyuk's story was fabricated and altered.... I don't know how to feel. What he experienced was inhumane and terrible for sure, but.. knowing now that he lied changes how I feel about it. I have the original 2012 printing and read it not long after it's original release, so I feel like if I'm going to reread this book, I will have to get the new 2015 printing to due to the revisions Blaine Harden has made since my initial read.

We are introduced to Shin Dong-hyuk at the execution of his mother and older brother. By the second chapter a six year old girl is beaten to death at the camp school for the crime of stealing 5 kernels of corn. It's tough slogging here as Blaine Harden profiles the only know person to have been born in a total control zone camp (in this case Camp 14 considered one of the harshest) and escaped. North Korea's labour camps hold between 150,000 and 200,000 prisoners and have existed for twice as long as the Soviet gulags and 12 times longer than Nazi concentration camps.

Shin's life outside North Korea has proven no less challenging. Being raised in that environment leaves Shin suspicious of others, aping the human emotions expected of him. He's still looking for footing in a world completely foreign to him and once again raises the spectre of how a reunified Korea could ever hope to reintegrate such a starkly divided nation.

It's been a while since I've read anything about North Korea, and this slim biography of a young man who was born inside a North Korean prison camp and remained there until he escaped in his early 20s is harrowing, and ultimately very readable. Would have finished faster except I was trying my darndest not to pick it up right before bedtime!

Includes a decent amount of background on what happens in general with North Korean defectors, who travel through China to South Korea or even though other Asian countries first, their mental states and behaviors. Written by a former Washington Post reporter.