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The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“To start with, look at all the books.” Thus opens Jeffrey Eugenides third and latest novel with another memorable zinger – most definitely three for three. Alas, the odds for what follows those fabulous first lines aren’t nearly quite as zingy. So far, Eugenides is averaging a new title about every nine years. The Virgin Suicides (1993) shocks immediately: “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide – it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese – the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” Too bad I felt like I had to slog through the rest of the shockers. The Pulitzer-winning Middlesex (2002) begins with another attention grabber: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Unlike Suicides, that proved to be an enormously rewarding read I’m still savoring.
So when Marriage hit shelves last fall, I got nervous; something about disappointing follow-up titles puts me in an irrationally foul mood for far too long. Eventually I succumbed to veteran David Pittu‘s narration stuck in my ears during one of my high-mileage running weeks. That the book itself remained unopened might give you a hint as to my final verdict.
Here’s the general gist: Three undergrads – privileged, well-read Madeleine; brilliant, unbalanced Leonard (whom Pittu inexplicably voices with a distracting Jack Nicholson-like growl); and regretful, searching Mitchell – spend four years at Brown, graduate (more or less), and attempt to establish themselves as young adults in the real world. Bland Madeleine never gets over her anxiety over being so normal. Mercurial Leonard succumbs to his genetics. Charming Mitchell travels the world trying to find himself. In case you were waiting, the marriage part of the plot doesn’t kick in until the last 70 or so of the hefty 400+ pages (I’ll be good: no spoilers here!).
Being a lit major might enhance your reading experience – you could, for example, enjoy deconstructing why semiotics becomes an embodiment for a professor’s midlife crisis (leather jacket and all!). Barring that, you could create quite the literary laundry list populated by just about every canonic dead white man and (thankfully) more than a few female counterparts; the book’s first paragraph alone includes Wharton, James, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Lawrence, Levertov, and Colette … and, of course, given a protagonist named Madeleine, you’ll eventually find mention of Ludwig Bemelmans, as well.
In spite of all that erudition – “look at all the books” indeed!! – the triangulated life stories never move beyond the flat, printed page (and drones on for 15.5 hours stuck in the ears). Ah, well … at least I’ve got another eight years left to get over my foul mood of disappointment as I wait for that next Eugenides title – my current calculations have me convinced it should be remarkable.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific
Ichiro by Ryan Inzana
A shape-shifting teapot which releases a mischievous tanuki when heated. A fatherless hapa Japanese American boy headed to Japan to stay with his mother’s father whom he barely knows. Two stories, two cultures, two vastly different worlds, all intertwine to create a fantastical adventure in Ryan Inzana‘s surprising, highly original Ichiro.
In a New York City subway, young Ichiro watches his Japanese American mother accosted by street youths with their racist comments of “chink-ee eyes” and “could blind her wit’ dental floss.” She doesn’t engage, merely moving away, assuming (hoping) that Ichiro’s headphones have kept him protected for the time being. Ironically, and sadly, Ichiro is learning a not dissimilar racism from his bitter American grandfather – having lost his son, Ichiro’s father, to war – directed at the diverse immigrants in their post-9/11 neighborhood.
Ichiro is not quite ready to visit his mother’s homeland where she will work and he will be left behind with his Japanese grandfather. In Japan, Ichiro doesn’t quite fit in either, clearly being more American than Japanese … and the local bullies know how to make him feel unwelcome. But his grandfather is patient and gentle, ready with both historical and cultural lessons and insight. Having survived WWII, he also explains a very different view of war and its aftermath to his unaware grandson.
One night, Ichiro ventures out into his grandfather’s backyard where he’s set a trap to catch whoever – or whatever – has been stealing all the ripening fruit. When he startles a hungry tanuki, Ichiro is suddenly pulled into a completely different world … where all hell breaks loose – literally. He’s about to experience a war of his own … good guys, bad guys, and all the other characters in between …
The constant movement Inzana captures in his sweeping art quickly draws readers into his multi-layered story. Moments that might occasionally seem overly didactic to adult readers as Ichiro is forced to outgrow his simplified, childhood view of clear-cut right and wrong will probably go unnoticed by the book’s intended audience of middle grade and high school readers. In spite of the story’s swift pace, young readers will hopefully pause to give serious consideration to the all-encompassing tragedies of war, violence, collateral damage, in addition to everyday acts including bullying.
While Inzana entertains, he also gives warning. “What is the world coming to?” the final panel asks in full technicolor. Surely, with the future always encroaching, our youth will need to answer sooner than later.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
Being always a dozen or so titles behind, a confluence of certain events seem to need to happen for some posts to finally get from my brain to the … uh … the virtual world.
First things first: River of Doubt is absolutely riveting! But for me to tell you that, I had to be reminded to do so by sitting through two-plus soporific hours in a chilly theater last night watching (the usually enchanting) John Lithgow stumble and scream through a couple of decades of journalist Joseph Alsop’s life – Alsop’s grandmother, Corinne Roosevelt, was Teddy Roosevelt’s younger sister and appears sporadically throughout River. Then I opened an email this morning from a Smithsonian APA Program colleague about only reading fiction, so just to be contrary, here I am …
Teddy Roosevelt’s third bid for the presidency in 1912 was a spectacular failure. Having survived a sickly childhood by taking on impossible adventures out of sheer will, Roosevelt refused to quietly retire, and instead headed to South America to undertake what would be the greatest physical challenge of his life: to chart the unknown waters of what was then known as the Rio da Dúvida, or the River of Doubt, which winds through Brazil and eventually flows into the Amazon.
Former National Geographic magazine editor/writer Candice Millard tracks the grueling journey through journals, letters, and articles not only of the former President, but also of his tenacious co-participants, including Roosevelt’s son Kermit, Brazil’s most famous explorer and expedition co-commander Colonel Cândido Rondon, and legendary American naturalist and explorer George Cherrie. Before the expedition actually reaches the River (possible spoiler alert here), Roosevelt will have had to separate from the incompetent outfitter Anthony Fiala and the arrogant and racist Father John Augustine Zahm.
As much as the expedition’s human participants are the book’s heroes (and villains both), Millard’s most excellent adventures are enhanced by ever-so-graphic descriptions (or nightmares, if you will) of the flora and fauna throughout the uncharted territory (no spoilers here, ahem … except to mention that piranhas ain’t got nothin’ on candiru!).
With Paul Michael narrating, I found myself running the river trails with more than the usual alertness – hey, I’m in DC, I never know what sort of slimy surprise I might run into! Millard’s expert storytelling proves absolutely addictive – surely, the late President is shouting ‘bully!!’ for her debut effort from wherever his latest adventure might be.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Nonethnic-specific, South American
Excuses Excuses by Anushka Ravishankar, art by Gabrielle Manglou
Ack! Taxes are due today! Already! For those filing extensions, this one’s for you (and me, ahem!) …
In spite of the best intentions, some things just don’t happen like they should … and, like young Neel, we’re usually ready with the Excuses Excuses! Neel announces daily the various ways he’ll improve himself: “On Monday Neel decided / He’d be in time for school … On Wednesday he decided / To be a helpful son …,” all the way to Sunday when “he decided / That he would mend his ways / Then suddenly he realized / That he’d run out of days.”
In spite of Neel’s tenacious attempts at betterment, on Monday his “clock began to tick / In an anti-clockwise way” just to make him late again. Instead of being a helpful son on Wednesday, he brings home a canine friend instead. His Sunday intentions land him in the corner for “[a] day to be sorry …,” no attention given to his protestations of “It’s not at all fair!”
Poor Neel, no matter how much “he explained how he really tried / What deeply grieved him / Was no one believed him. / Excuses! Excuses! Excuses! they cried.” But lucky for his tenacious, and not a little mischievous spirit, “There’s no cause for sorrow, / I’ll start once again – It’s a new week tomorrow!” Here’s to the inspiring determination of youth, indeed!
Excuses hits shelves next month from Tara Books, a fabulous picture book publisher based in South India, with titles readily available Stateside through distribution by Publishers Group West. Peruse Tara’s website and you’ll see that the indie press brings together “a growing tribe of adventurous people from around the world” to create wondrously eye-popping titles.
In Excuses, Gabrielle Manglou, an artist from the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, uses a combination of photographs, watercolor, graffiti, and other media to uniquely enhance the imaginatively catchy rhythms of Indian children’s poet and veteran kiddie author Anushka Ravishankar. Art and text – intertwined with balanced whimsy – imbue Neel’s tall tales with colorful energy and unlimited creativity. Not to mention just good ol’ fun, fun, fun.
We can only hope our children eventually learn a wee bit more veracity, although surely not at the cost of ever losing that contagious vivacity … no matter how taxing (couldn’t resist!) real life might become!
Readers: Children
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Indian, South Asian
The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai
How silly of me for waiting so long to read this, the venerable Anita Desai’s latest, when I’ve had the galley for almost a year (it pubbed last December). Instead, I’ve slogged through too many disappointing, tedious, nightmare-inducing titles when I could have been celebrating just how affecting great storytelling can be … my one regret is that the slim collection contains only three novellas, although that, too, is a much-needed reminder of quality over quantity.
Neither the book’s back-cover blurb nor the accompanying press release offers much information about the collection’s contents, except to reveal that the three stories are set in India “in the not-too-distant past,” followed by many (well-deserved) superlatives about Desai’s writing. To approach the stories knowing virtually nothing is truly a gift (so no spoilers here). I don’t think I’ve ever actually committed this cliché to print … but sinking into Desai’s quiet stories was a cleansing breath of fresh air after too many oppressive texts in a row. Allow me to share just these few thoughts …
“The Museum of Final Journeys” will leave you startled. A young man, new to civil service, begins his career in a remote town. What he finds in a once-glorious compound reduced to a pleading cry for help from its caretaker, will haunt him for decades with “Could I have done more?”
In “Translator Translated” – my personal favorite – two disparate schoolmates meet decades later, their professional lives converging over an obscure book. Their exchange will surely have you rethinking authorship, accessibility, and literary legacy – not to mention the nature of human relationships. Pay close attention to the unexpected shifts in point-of-view …
The final story, the eponymous “Artist,” is a labyrinthine exploration of our bonds – the ones in name only, and the ones we actually uphold – to family, friends, and even Mother Earth.
On the book’s final page, a character shouts, “‘That is what we need for a finish!’” And on this Friday-the-13th, I appropriate his sentiment with gusto: This is what I need to finish a mighty crazy week! Feel free to join me …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Princess Knight (vols. 1-2) by Osamu Tezuka, translated by Maya Rosewood
With all that swashbuckling fun, Princess Knight – recently available in full, in English translation, in two volumes – is seemingly one of the godfather of manga’s more goofy stories. Up in heaven, God’s in the process of deciding gender for each about-to-be-born baby, assigning a girl heart or a boy heart just before sending them down to earth. Mischievous angel Tink (a nominal nod to Tinkerbell?) decides one such baby “look[s] like you’d be a boy anyways!” and stuffs a blue heart in its mouth … but seconds later, God decides she’s going to be a girl, and suddenly she’s both. Uh-oh. So God orders Tink earthbound with the gender-bender baby to retrieve the boy heart if she turns out to the girl God foretold.
Down in earthly Silverland, the queen is about to give birth. She needs to bear a son to carry on the royal line, or else the throne will be stolen by an evil relative. Princess Sapphire enters the world, but in a stuttering mistranslation, a prince is announced to the assembled kingdom. The young royal grows up as Prince Sapphire (at least to the public) – even though she bears an uncanny resemblance to Disney’s animated Snow White. She’s the epitome of princely power, but give her a flouncy gown and a hefty wig, and she morphs into the most graceful and elegant stranger who (of course) captures the heart of Prince Franz Charming from the nearby kingdom of (what else?) Goldland.
But all is not well in the fair lands. Duke Duralumin is determined to install his less-than-competent son (named Plastic!) on the throne. Duralumin’s henchman Lord Nylon will do anything to get rid of Sapphire. Meanwhile, Madame Hell wants Prince Franz for her own daughter, the goddess Venus decides the hapless prince should actually be hers, and a handsome young pirate falls in love with Sapphire and vows to do her bidding. Through it all, Tink must try to keep Sapphire safe, long enough to return that errant heart to heaven.
Beneath the adventurous, fast-paced, often comical façade, Tezuka adds more than a few heavy-duty layers: gender politics, equality and equity, class issues, questions of identity, definitions of morality, and more. Most interestingly, Tezuka takes on Christianity, perhaps more overtly than in any other of his works (certainly that I’ve read thus far). From gender identification as God-ordained and the possibility of ‘holy’ mistakes in the first chapter (daring!), to the mix-and-matching of a Christian God with ancient Greek deities, to crucifix-fearing evil characters (including Satan), to surprising representations of heaven and hell, Tezuka pushes one button after another … just to see what might happen. The result is a delightful, thoughtful challenge – visually, intellectually … and even spiritually.
To check out other titles by the godfather of manga on BookDragon, click here.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Mr. Reaper by Tatsuya Miyanishi, translated by Vertical, Inc.
While most of us all know our birthdays, not all of us know when we might pass from this life. “The only one who knows, / the one who decides the day / is me, the Reaper.”
Out in the forest, the Reaper points out a little pink piglet to unsuspecting readers, and warns, “‘The poor thing will be dying / in a few days.’” A hungry wolf decides he can’t eat the sick little piggy in such a state, and takes him home to nurse back to health … and then he’ll have his tasty meal. The Reaper watches, warning us that the wolf, too, is not long for this world, oh well.
No matter how diligently – and so sweetly – the wolf tries to make the little piglet better, nothing seems to work. But then the wolf remembers that his grandpa once told him about a certain plant that has the power to cure any illness. Day after day he searches, but the piglet’s condition only worsens. Through rain and wind, the tenacious wolf keeps seeking the magical red plant …
Not to spoil the ending (really!), but I have to confess that it’s happy. Because even when all hope seems to be lost, the Reaper can change his mind and a miracle or two can happen even for the most unlikely pair.
Japanese children’s book author Tatsuya Miyanishi makes his English-language debut with Mr. Reaper, although translations of some of his many titles into French, Chinese, and Korean have already established him internationally. His boldly colored, simplified drawings have clever, unexpected details, especially the watchful eyes of the Reaper as he witnesses the transformation of the relationship between pig and wolf – between prey and predator – develop into something else entirely. The book jacket/book cover, by the way, is ingeniously well-designed, as well.
The message for children – and their various adults – is certainly clear: in spite of (deathly) challenging circumstances, a little bit of heartfelt caring can make delightful dancing partners of even the worst-imagined foes – ”‘[b]odies twisting, butts wriggling / to that silly ditty they’re happily singing.’”
Readers: Children
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, .Translation, Japanese
What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers
First things first: Let’s try to clear up some of the oxymoronic labels. Although this title is classified as a novel written by Dave Eggers (he of bad boy-genius fame for his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and, of course, the mini-empire that is McSweeney’s), it’s also got “Autobiography” in the title. Yes, Valentino Achak Deng is a real person. And all the proceeds from this book go to Deng’s eponymously-named foundation, established in 2006 to improve the lives of Sudanese in Sudan and elsewhere. Yes, it’s written by Eggers in first person, that is, in Deng’s voice. The book opens with an important preface, signed by Deng in 2006, in Atlanta: “This book is the soulful account of my life …” But he also explains, “… over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation. Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel … though it is fictionalized, it should be noted that the world I have known is not so different from the one depicted within these pages.” [An expanded preface, written a year later by Deng, is available online here.]
Given some of the recent memorably-outed memoirs (James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces probably being the most high-profile, Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea being the most devastating), perhaps Eggers wanted to be especially careful. His own Staggering Genius had some hiccups in spite of catapulting him into literary stardom: his sister Beth’s public comments about accuracy (and then her sort-of retraction, followed by her shocking, tragic suicide), and the fact that later editions added a lengthy pre-book of multiple sections including a preface that begins, “For all the author’s bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, various purposes.” Which is all reason enough why this Autobiography gets classified as a novel; it even garnered a “fiction finalist” honor for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards. So we’re all clear now, right?
With the labels figured out, readers may well wish this was fiction, given the horrific nature of Deng’s experiences, and even more so the inhumanity as we humans prey upon one another, again and again and again.
“I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door,” the novel beings. There Deng finds an African American woman, asking to use his phone because her car broke down. His Good Samaritan trust will get him robbed, beaten, gagged, and bound for many hours. He’ll sit through a careless interview with the distracted police. He’ll be kept waiting for hours in an empty emergency room. He’ll walk the many miles to his early morning job at a health club where he will be lectured for getting into a fight by his boss. All during this ordeal, he will recount his wrenching life story in bits and pieces, speaking silently to the too-many uncaring strangers he encounters.
Deng is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He escaped widespread death and destruction in his small village in Sudan, spent 13 years wandering then surviving the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and arrived in the U.S. as a refugee with virtually nothing. For most of his young life, Deng did not know the fate of his family. He watched his friends just sit down and die. He witnessed unspeakable violence. He experienced deprivation and suffering for which words cannot suffice. And yet in the midst of the neverending nightmares, he also recalls laughing with his friends, falling in love, being part of a caring makeshift family-of-circumstance, and is blessed with an especially nurturing bond with a Japanese aid worker in the Kenyan camp who keeps extending his African stay until he can see Deng safely on his way to the U.S. Even as he finally escapes, Deng’s new American life is hardly easy (crime and even murder doesn’t disappear), and yet he manages to hold on to hope … and, as always, survives.
“Even when my hours were darkest, I believed that some day I would share my experiences with readers, so as to prevent the same horrors from repeating themselves,” Deng concludes. “This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle. To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope, and my belief in humanity.” Readers: take note … that word again – humanity. Share the story, grab this book, reclaim humanity.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Memoir, African, African American
Larf by Ashley Spires
As we leave the wild mountains and head back to (so-called) civilization this morning, I’m convinced that Ashley Spires‘ Larf captures that disorienting journey just right, with lots of easy laughter offered on every page. Re-entry always requires maintaining a sense of humor!
Larf thinks he might be the world’s only sasquatch. He’s a seven-foot-tall vegetarian who has a preference for red scarves. He jogs, he gardens. He lives with his bunny-friend Eric somewhere far in the snow-capped mountains. Nobody knows that Larf exists, and “he likes it that way.”
Until … reading the newspaper one morning, he sees an article claiming the upcoming appearance of a sasquatch in the nearby city. Curiosity – and the possibility of hanging out with someone of his own kind – makes him reluctantly head out of the wilds …
He does his best to fit in (he’s “a master of camouflage,” after all), but with fur and feet like that, strangers tend to take notice. “All the activity, all the people and all the noise was making things worse. Larf can hardly see straight, let alone think straight, in all this hubbub.” [I know just how he feels, too!] But Larf perseveres … and his tenacity eventually leads to a promising (beastly) meeting.
While Spires’ storytelling is adorably amusing, her illustrations are even better. Her much-appreciated, subversive humor is evident throughout: a hapa family watches Larf-footage on their tiny television as the potato-munching father comments, “Aunt Mildred?” and the know-it-all son glibly declares, “A computer-generated fake”; Larf squeezes into skinny jeans for his city trek, strapping tiny bunny Eric into a baby front-pack contraption for the journey; Larf gets mistaken yet again by a passerby at the ticket booth for Aunt Mildred (definitely don’t want to meet her in a dark alley!); the city bus depot fills with a multi-culti menagerie of passengers trying not to stare, including the pigeons. For careful sleuths, Spires playfully draws hints into each scene from Larf”s city arrival until he’s ready to leave, as to what – or who – is coming, cleverly adding another layer of interaction with her younger readers.
Now if only going back to reality could be even half the fun … ah, life …!
Readers: Children
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Canadian, Nonethnic-specific
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden
Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s now-classic The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, the title I previously held as the most horrific testimony of inhumanity.
More recently, I cried through 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I ignorantly questioned the veracity of the torturous conditions in Adam Johnson’s recent, deservedly bestselling novel The Orphan Master’s Son. I paid attention to headlines about North Korea’s potential nuclear threats and the succession of Kim Jong Eun to the mythic Kim Dynasty.
But nothing prepared me for the odyssey of North Korean Shin Dong-Hyuk as told by journalist Blaine Harden, former Washington Post bureau chief for East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Shin, who changed his name “after arriving in South Korea, an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,” is the only known North Korean who was born in a prison camp to have escaped and survived.
Shin’s story is vastly different from that of other survivors; as Harden chillingly reveals, it doesn’t fit “a conventional narrative arc [of survival]” which includes a loving family, a comfortable home, a sense of community governed by moral principles, from which the protagonist is brutally torn. In utter contrast, Shin began his life barely human: his prisoner parents were arbitrarily paired by guards to breed, whatever offspring they produced would become slaves who would work and die in Camp 14, considered “[b]y reputation … the toughest” of the country’s six known camps.
Shin experienced no familial bonds. His mother was nothing more than competition for food. He barely saw his older brother and father. He described himself “as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends – and feel no remorse.” Preying equaled survival. Only much later would Shin learn the criminal history of his family: “The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during [the Korean War]… Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son.”
At 4, he witnessed his first execution. At 6, he watched a classmate beaten to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket. At 14, he survived heinous torture, then witnessed his mother being hung and his brother shot. At 22, he lost a finger as punishment for dropping a sewing machine.
At 23, on January 2, 2005, Shin climbed over the electrified corpse of his fellow escapee, and began a labyrinthine journey toward freedom. His own slight body bears innumerable scars of mutilation. When he escaped, he knew virtually nothing of the outside world, yet he miraculously traversed North Korea, China, South Korea, and finally made his way to the United States.
To call Shin’s adjustment to his new life “difficult” is grave understatement: “’I escaped physically … I haven’t escaped psychologically.’” Defectors understandably suffer from a myriad of clinical symptoms including post-traumatic syndrome, paranoia, paralyzing survival guilt. Shin struggles at an even more basic level: “’I am evolving from being an animal … [b]ut it is going very, very slowly.’”
As horrific as Shin’s ordeals have been, “’Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps,’” a former camp guard and driver told Harden. Others have endured “worse hardship.” Compounding such stomach-churning news is the realization that “[t]he camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience.” They hold 200,000 prisoners according to the U.S. State Department and several human rights groups; they have lasted twice as long as the Soviet Gulag, and 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Google Earth provides high-resolution satellite photographs “to anyone with an Internet connection.” Amnesty International has documented new construction in the camps as recently as 2011.
A book without parallel, Escape from Camp 14 is a riveting nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an end in sight. Inspired by Harden’s front-page Washington Post story in December 2008 – the article from which this book originated – a reader addresses a chilling question to all of us: “’High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb all the rail lines to Hitler’s camps … 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.’”
Review: Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Korean, North Korean
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