Escape from Camp 14

Harden, an experienced American journalist, it tells the extraordinary story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in the gulag to have escaped' Guardian 'Harden knows a lot about North Korea and he wears his knowledge lightly ... Harden deserves a lot more than 'wow' for this terrifying, grim and, at the very end, slightly hopeful story of a damaged man still alive only by chance, whose life, even in freedom, has been dreadful' Literary Review 'Harrowing story of a young man's flight from one of the slave labor camps where as many as 200,000 political unreliables -- a category that includes not just those who run afoul of authority but their relatives for three generations -- are sent to be starved, tortured and ultimately worked to death. Harden's story of Shin Dong-hyuk differs from the best previous refugee narratives -- "The Aquariums of Pyongyang" by Kang Chol-hwan, Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy" -- because Shin was in every sense a product of Camp 14. Born in captivity to a pair of inmates picked by camp commanders for a loveless bit of procreation, Shin grew up with no awareness of anything beyond the electrified fences. He is like the boy-narrator of Emma Donoghue's novel "Room," whose entire world is the backyard shed where he and his kidnapped mother are held captive. Except that the boy in "Room" knows love. Harden's book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country' New York Times 'A skilfully researched piece of book-length journalism uncluttered, as far as seems reasonable, with emotion. It is old now, the saying that for evil to exist, good men must do nothing. And that is what you take away, more than anything, from Harden's book. More than why the crimes against humanity are happening in the first place, more than whose responsibility it is to stop them, the question is why -- for the sake not of politics but of mankind -- is nobody in power doing anything about it?' Spectator 'Shin's existence in the camp and his escape to the unknown world beyond its fences is the remarkable and harrowing tale that former Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden recounts in spare, unadorned prose in Escape From Camp 14 ... while the horrors of the Russian gulag, Nazi genocide and Cambodian mass murders have been amply documented, North Korea's grisly conditions remain shadowy and under-publicized. In depicting the depravity of North Korean prison life, Harden's book is an important portrait of man's inhumanity to man' Washington Post