Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Sovie...more
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No more brazen and poetic meaning could be found than reading this line from the book, once upon a time seems almost pertinent to this book. But once upon a time gives the semblance of fiction, and while this book eerily reminds one of a few George O...more
A mixture of 1984, Animal Farm and the Nazi Dachau concentration camp. It is the story of North Korea and worse in every single respect than every dystopian novel you've ever read. Here, one is born, lives one's whole life and dies in a vast camp where fear rules through hunger and brutality. One man, only one, escaped and this is his story.
Not an easy book t...more
This is an incredibly gripping book. While I was reading it, I was so immersed in the story that it took a while to come back to the real world.
I am glad I read Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy before reading this, because I already knew how bad the situation is for ordinary citizens in North Korea, and it was all the more powerful to realize that there are people who live even worse lives in the country's prison camps.
This is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, a young man born and raised i...more
Book of the week.http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...
The story of Shin Dong Hyuk, who was born in a North Korean gulag and escaped to the West.
BBC blurb - Prisoners work 15 hour days mining coal, building dams, sewing military uniforms. Beatings and executions are common and they are always hungry. No one born in one of these camps has ever escaped . until Shin. This is his story.
Read by Kerry Shale
Abridged and produced by Jane Marshall A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
2/4/2012:...more
Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy introduces us how ordinary North Koreans escaped from DPRK, but Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 tells us how a criminal who was born in Camp 14 completed the mission impossible.
The world hasn't settl...more
من خلال حكاية شين دونغ-هيوك، يقوم المؤلف بعملية توصيف لما يجري في كوريا الشمالية تحت ظل النظام القائم في ال...more
Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden deals with very mature and disturbing ideas like death, betrayal, and abuse. The story is about a North Korean boy living in a political camp since he was born. The political camp lasted more than the Holocaust and Joseph Stalin’s gulags. The camps still go on today. And only one person escaped to tell the tale of these horrible political camps.
According to his abusive mother, Shin Dong-Hyuk is at the camp because his grandfather tried to escape to...more
My Thoughts: This was not an easy story to read; it was almost surreal but then so are stories of the torture, death and devastation of concentration camps in WWII. It is truly amazing that Shin was able to escape and even more mind boggling that this type of torture still exists in the 21st century. I'm glad I wasn't this aware of these atrocities of North Korea during the two years I lived in Seoul; I don't think I could have lived that close knowing of what was happening just over the border....more
When my friend Alexandra Wilks gifted me Escape From Camp 14 - a book on North Korea - I couldn't control my excitement to the extent that I found it hard to hold the book open because my hands were shaking so much. I may have jizzed my pants too. Those who know me will be aware that I have a huge obsession with North Korea. I fastidiously follow any news or analysis of the country. My Twitter bio reads "World's leading authority on loving adoration of North Korea." The country is almost cartoon
...more
Twenty-six years ago, Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside Camp 14, one of five sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea. Located about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the labor camp is a 'complete control district,' a no-exit prison where the only sentence is life. Inmates work 12 to 15-hour days in the camp – mining coal, building dams, sewing military uniforms – until they are executed, killed in work-related accidents or die of illness that is usually triggered by hunger. No one bo
...more
During...more
This book is the biography of a young man who was born in a North Korean labor/concentration camp, grew up there surrounded by misery and murder, and hadn't heard about the rest of the world until he was a yo...more
I think about what I know about North Korea and realize it is very little. I know the leader scares me a bit, but I had no idea how bad it really is. As an educator and parent why do we not raise the awareness? We teach about the Holocaust and other terrible moments in...more
The individuals residing within them may have done nothing agains...more
There truly is nothing as brutal and horrific as the gulag / camp system of nK. Modeled after Stalin's prison camps in Russia - the 3 generations of 'Great Leaders' in nK have taken the oppression of people to a new level. With the guiding principle...more
So why four stars?
Quite frankly, because it's a book people need to read. People need to understand just what is going on in North Korea today. One day we will have to...more
by chance it caught my eye in a bookstore and i decided to buy it, hoping it would give me more insight into the economic, social and political atmosphere of the country that's been making headlines every day for the last few months. this was a decision that i did not regret. i couldn't put this book down and finished in less than 24 hours.
using a mix of first hand accounts by labor camp s...more
Escape From Camp 14 is the true story of a survivor who escaped one of the most mind numbingly atrocious existences I have ever heard of. The book's themes harken to the familiar dystopian fictional worlds of George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, as well as the true horrors we learned in history class of Auschwitz and the gulag labor camps. Escape From Camp 14 is strikingly similar to these, but this story is a very real wo...more
Title: Escape From Camp 14
Author: Blaine Harden
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Place: New York City, NY
Binding: Kindle Edition
Number of Pages: 230
Price: $12.99
ISBN: 0670023329
Translation: English
My first impression of this book was somewhere along the lines of “This is going to be the most painful thing I have ever read in my life.” That thought would soon change after reading the first few chapters of the book.
Escape From Camp 14 tells the story of Shing Dong Hyuk. Shing...more
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Harden's most recent book is "Escape From Camp 14." He is also the author of "A Ri...more
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[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanityconcluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.”

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I actually went back and put that in, correcting...more
Mar 26, 2013 09:20pm
Apr 10, 2013 06:21pm