A review by halthemonarch
Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

4.0

Holy Shit. Story 10/10. Harden’s writing style chaffs however. There’s Shin’s incredible story of being born and surviving until adulthood in a political prisoner labor camp. When you hear “political prisoner labor camp” you might think of Nazi Germany, not something that is happening so viciously and casually to an already famine stricken swaths of North Korea. In present day. The chilling account of a guard beating a six year old to death as nothing out of the ordinary, the executions of his mother and brother and subsequent deterioration with his relationship with his father, the reason he was jailed in the first place coming to light, and the fate of Shin’s escape mate was all interspersed with statistics and sterilized overviews of the geopolitical climate in nearby Pyongyang. I wish the account was written statistics first then a start to finish of Shin’s journey with feeling since all the context would have been, in this case, laid out (and perhaps with different word choice in some places). Even still, this is such an important book and I will definitely be thinking about it for weeks.