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A seamstress who regularly cleaned the superintendent's room was Park Choon Young, whom Shin knew from secondary school and who operated a sewing machine that he maintained. Four months after she began spending afternoons in the superintendent's room, Shin heard from another former schoolfriend that she was pregnant. Her condition was kept secret until her belly began to poke through her uniform, then she disappeared

Working in the factory put Shin in close daily contact with several hundred women in their teens, twenties and thirties. Some were strikingly attractive, and their sexuality created tension on the factory floor. Part of this was due to their ill-fitting uniforms and the fact that they had no bras and few wore underwear. Sanitary napkins were not available.

Being male in the camp would be bad enough, but a woman? D:

Oh wow. 1000 followers? Thanks for paying attention to me and thinking my reviews and updates are worth reading! ^_^

Suicide was not uncommon in the camp. They usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force. Some from of punishment would await the family regardless of whether or not a critical note were left behind. The Party saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn't around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found.

This is honestly too bleak for me to continue reading in one sitting.

Can't find myself caring enough about this to finish and I want to get some stuff off my "currently reading" shelf. Anyone want to tell me it has an awesome end so I should keep going? Otherwise, it's going on hold.

When I'm deciding on what to read next sometimes I'll grab a handful of books and read the first chapter of each and then go with whichever one was the most interesting. This is a cozy mystery set in rural Japan in a family-run inn ... oooh, there's even a local ghost story and a castle ... ended up reading 3 chapters last night before I even realized it.

Every prisoner knew the first rule of Camp 14, subsection 2: "Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot immediately."
He was angry that she would put his life at risk for the sake of his older brother. He was afraid he would be implicated in the escape and shot.
He was also jealous that his brother was getting rice.

Shin is going to rat on his mother and brother because of rice.

The teachers told them that North Korea was an independent state and noted the existence of cars and trains. But they said nothing about North Korea's geography, its neighbors, its history or its leaders. Shin had only a vague notion of who the Great Leader and the Dear Leader were.

Now, that's scary. They view the laborers as so unimportant and sub-human they don't even bother to indoctrinate them.

Physical education meant running around outside and playing on iron bars in the schoolyard. Sometimes students would go down to the river and gather snails for their teacher. There were no ball games. Shin saw a soccer ball for the first time when he was twenty-three, after fleeing to China.

The kids didn't have a single ball? I just don't understand how they can treat people, and kids, so inhumanely.

There were no reading exercises, as the teacher had the only book. For writing exercises, students were instructed to explain how they had failed to work hard and follow rules.
Shin learned to add and subtract, but not to multiply and divide. To this day, when he needs to multiply, he adds a column of numbers.

Shin learned how to read and write the Korean alphabet, doing exercises on coarse paper made in the camp from corn husks. Each term, he was given one notebook with twenty-five pages. For a pencil, he often used a sharpened shaft of charred wood. He did not know of the existence of erasers.

I don't know why that one fact hit me so hard. So unbelievable.

There are parts of this that are so intense I can envision the scene in my head and hear the words they shout, making my heart pound.

Corn's triumph is the direct result of its overproduction, and that has been a disaster for the people who grow it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also exacted a toll on the farmer's soil, the quality of the local water and the overall health of his community, the biodiversity of his landscape, and the health of all the creatures living on or downstream from it.

Oh. Is that all?

I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald's meal through is mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant. In order of diminishing returns, this is how the lab measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and french fries (23 percent).

One of the primary requisites of a good restaurant critic is the ability to be anonymous.

Huh. Imagine that.

Guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects.
Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the winter.

I think if you have to eat rats to stave off disease, you're in one of the circles of Hell.

Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.

I don't think those two sentences could make me appreciate the excess I have any more.

"High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps," the editorial concluded. "Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing."

North Korea's labor camps have now existed for twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. There is no disputer about where these camps are. High-resolution satellite photographs, accessible on Google Earth to anyone with an Internet connection, show vast fenced compounds sprawling through the rugged mountains of North Korea.

Shin's mother beat him and his father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother five nights a year, ignored him. His brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.
Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. God did not disappear or die. Shin had never heard of him.

Why had he then abandoned the store? And then she remembered. Back in November there had come from near the edge of the woods the sound that sends all of the animals in the forest shivering to their hiding places—the sound of hunters' guns shooting, the sound that is accompanied, for someone, by a fiery stabbing pain. And then he never needs his stored food again.

: (

The girl tapped her food, impatient. She pointed to herself. "Dead. As in a doornail. I took a dirt nap, pushed up some daisies, reached room temperature, pined for the fjords—"

OMG YES. The Dead Parrot Sketch never gets old. Thank you for making my day and including this reference.

People are not reacting the way they should be to a decapitated head in a bowling ball bag.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

Add fat or sugar to anything and it's going to taste better on the tongue of an animal that natural selection has wired to seek out energy-dense foods. Animals studies prove the point: Rats presented with solutions of pure sucrose or tubs of pure lard will gorge themselves sick. Whatever nutritional wisdom the rats are born with breaks down when faced with sugars and fats in unnatural concentrations.

Natural selection predisposed us to the taste of sugar and fat because sugars and fats offer the most energy per bite. Yet in nature—in whole foods—we seldom encounter these nutrients in the concentrations we now find them in in processed foods. The power of food science lies in it ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts, fooling the omnivore's inherited food selection system.

Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30% more than they would otherwise. And while this is a useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability, it's a disaster in an environment of fast-food abundance, when the opportunity to feast presents itself 24/7. Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.