My Amazon Kindle is really changing my way of reading. First, because I can read a lot more article through Readability: when I see a mildly long text (usually form Arts & Letters Daily) I just click in Readability's "Send to Kindle" bookmarklet instead of maintaining a tab in my Firefox to read some day (and eventually just closing it). This is how I've read this review and found that Escape from Camp 14 One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West was available to Kindle. Then came the second change: I just bought the book - my first Kindle book purchase, except for a dictionary. Well, I can assure it was a good deal.

Blaine Harden is not a great stylist. Is not a bad one, either: his prose is direct and clear and somewhat cold. That is not a problem, however, because the dullest narrative of the history of Shin Dong-hyuk would be as appalling as a Dostoyevsky novel. More than that, Harden improves the narrative of Shin's life, since the North Korean escapee, still struggling to adapt to the free world, just did not have the tools to express this impressive history.

I have to confess I just doubted all the history was true. Not because the inhumane episodes of cruelty ant suffering, but because the luck of Shin is impressively unlikely. He is the only person born in a North Korean political prison to escape, and it is easy to see why when you read the book. Note that he was born in the prison: he has not committed any crime (not even in a dictatorial sense!) but instead was imprisoned, tortured and almost murdered since its first day because his uncle defected from North Korea decades before Shin's birth. He just live in one incredibly horrendous concentration camp all of his life, at the point he just did not know there was another way of living and, as a consequence, had never thought about escaping.

The idea came to his mind after talking with some new prisoners, who talked to him about the outer world: North Korea itself, South Korea, China etc. They described the most impressive stuff - TVs, radios, Internet - but the only thing to catch Shin's attention was food: as a intentionally malnourished victim of North Korean terror, his sole interest was to eat the almost unknown rice and the unimaginable grilled pork. As a consequence, he combined with another prisoner an escape. His partner just died in the try but he, through a series of almost impossible lucky situations, got out the concentration camp and then from North Korea.

The history is just as fascinating as it is sad. Blaine Harden made a great favor to all of us when bringing to light of the English-speaking world the terror between China and the Korean DMZ.

***

I and my family stated a reading club. The first book to read was The Catcher in the Rye. Man, Holden Caulfield is just unbearably annoying after reading Escape from Camp 14. What a mumbling, crying prick...