An urgent cry for compassion for the author’s fellow North Koreans, trapped and strangled of liberty and life.
A sobering account of survival of the fittest in North Korea by a young woman on the run for nearly a decade.
Translated originally from the French edition and reading like a slender, exciting, first-person French novel, this chronicle by Eunsun Kim (a nom de plume) re-creates in immediate-feeling detail the horrific conditions of starvation that prompted her mother to flee with the author and her sister across the Tumen River bordering China in the winter of 1998. The author, then 11 years old but appearing much younger due to her blighted growth caused by malnutrition, had been fairly oblivious to the increasingly dire conditions in North Korea as the famine gripped the country and food rations were cut back. Having lost the family’s beloved father, then the grandparents, the author’s mother nearly lost all hope, until she resolved to defect to China and become a traitor to her country—knowing little about the outside world and how hoodwinked the regimes of presidents Kim Il-sung (d. 1994) and his son Kim Jong-il kept the North Korean residents. Rejected by relatives when they showed up at an aunt’s house, the mother and two daughters lived on the streets in Rajin until the Tumen froze again and they could scurry across the river. Soon taken advantage of by a hardened procuress and forced into marriage with a Chinese peasant, the author’s mother had to bear a son in order to gain some freedom. The women dispersed into teeming Chinese cities to find jobs and gain false papers. It took years to make the necessary fortune required to pay smugglers to take them over the Mongolian border, at incredible risk and danger. Yet the welcome South Korea tendered toward the family was heartening, even if the South Koreans tended to look down on these poor refugees.
An urgent cry for compassion for the author’s fellow North Koreans, trapped and strangled of liberty and life.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06464-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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