Haunted

North Korea's government propaganda is infamous -- but Shin Dong-hyuk had never even heard of Kim Il sung.  He was born in a prison camp, but after 20 some years of enduring beatings, starvation, and psychological horrors, Shin escapes.  Journalist Blaine Harden attempts to tease out Shin's story in Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West.  A quick and engaging read, one is left with a sense that even though Shin is physically free from his tormentors, he is a complex person who may never be truly liberated from his past.  HM

Living Under The Great Leader

Culled from interviews with defectors, journalist Barbara Demick calls Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea an oral history of the people. Published in 2009, her subjects' recollections span the years after Kim Il-sung's rise following WWII and the transfer of power to Kim Jong-il after his father's death. Piecing together stories and memories, Demick is able to pull aside the curtain that has kept North Korea virtually closed to foreigners for the past half-decade and illustrate the daily struggles and suffering of the people themselves, from the "glory days" of the Kim regime through the Arduous March of the 1990s, a famine that killed anywhere between 800,000 to 3.5 million people.

Nothing to Envy was awarded the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. HM