Escape from Camp 14

[Chris Pascale]

Extremely well-written book about a guy who escaped North Korea. He was born in, and grew up in, Camp 14.

One critic said "Camp 14 was barely a prison camp," which sounds to me like it was a prison camp, even if just barely.

[lost_in_the_endless_aisle]

I enjoyed that very much. The descriptions of the camp are up there with Primo Levi's writing about Auschwitz in their peculiar horrors. It's interesting the sort of personalities that survive such situations; they seem to have an abnormal amount of tenacity (yes, ultimately Levi apparently committed suicide, though some claim that he suffered from syncope and that his fatal fall over a stair railing was accidental).

On similar (but somewhat less severe lines), the book Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard by Fan Shen is an interesting account the various horrors of China's Cultural Revolution.