The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Chol-hwan Kang
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465004717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
"Destined to become a classic" (Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking), this harrowing memoir of life inside North Korea was the first account to emerge from the notoriously secretive country -- and it remains one of the most terrifying. Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and North Korea's other leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Sent to the notorious labor camp Yodok when he was nine years old, Kang observed frequent public executions and endured forced labor and near-starvation rations for ten years. In 1992, he escaped to South Korea, where he found God and now advocates for human rights in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this book brings together unassailable firsthand experience, setting one young man's personal suffering in the wider context of modern history, giving eyewitness proof to the abuses perpetrated by the North Korean regime.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Chʻŏr-hwan Kang
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Kang Chol-hwan grew up in North Korean labour camps and escaped to South Korea to document his personal life as a testimonial to the hardships and atrocities that still constitute the lives of several hundred thousand people living in the gulag today.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Chol-hwan Kang
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465011047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Chol-Hwan Kang
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 9780465011056
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description

The Footnotes

Author: Ray Stickle
Publisher: FeetMustFollow Press
ISBN: 1311712577
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
There was the thin man up the beach walking with a noticeable limp, pinched eyeglasses perched on his nose, a pair of white slacks and a billowing white shirt, his Korean face further hidden by a low-worn white sun hat. Galden had been following the man for more than a week. An easy job for a beach bum. But a trip to South Korea soon changes things. Because the thin man on the beach has a history steeped in the shadows of the country he served, the country he fled: North Korea. Galden soon finds himself involved with a sociopathic gangster hell-bent on uncertain ends, an ex-military elite on a mission of vengeance spurred on by his traumatized wife, a beautiful woman who hides her identity behind a slowly crumbling façade, and, perhaps most threatening of all, his own alcohol-addled conscience’s attempt to grapple with hard decisions. How Galden navigates the kidnappings, explosions, and betrayals will determine whether he has an impact on the outcome or becomes nothing more than just a footnote to the affair.

Camps

Author: Aidan Forth
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487588305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populations spans the modern era. From Konzentrationslager in colonial Africa to strategic villages in Southeast Asia, from slave plantations in America to Uyghur sweatshops in Xinjiang, and from civilian internment in World War II to extraordinary rendition at Guantanamo Bay, mass detention is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. Camps offers a short but compelling guide to the varied manifestations of concentration camps in the last two centuries, while tracing provocative transnational connections with related institutions such as workhouses, migrant detention centers, and residential schools.

In North Korea

Author: Nanchu,
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
This is an account of an American woman's recent travels through North Korea. Throughout her journey, she continually witnessed rundown villages, starving children with hollow eyes, haggard women crawling in the fields for single grains of rice and civilians unloading food aid at the point of bayonets. The author predicts that North Korea's economic reform, which has just started, will progress slowly, but that the country will one day be open to the outside world. It may, however, take another twenty years for this reform to be complete. Small, reluctant changes have already happened though, and this book expresses optimism that one day the North Korean people will end their isolation and join the world's mainstream.

Before Evil

Author: Brandon K. Gauthier
Publisher: Tortoise Books
ISBN: 1948954621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1679

Book Description
Should we humanize the world's most inhumane leaders? Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Benito Mussolini. Mao Zedong. Kim Il Sung. Vladimir Lenin. These cruel dictators wrote their names on the pages of history in the blood of countless innocent victims. Yet they themselves were once young people searching for their place in the world, dealing with challenges many of us face—parental authority, education, romance, loss—and doing so in ways that might be uncomfortably familiar. Historian Brandon K. Gauthier has created a fascinating work—epic yet intimate, well-researched but immensely readable, clear-eyed and empathetic—looking at the lives of these six dictators, with a focus on their youths. We watch Lenin’s older brother executed at the hands of the Tsar’s police—an event that helped radicalize this overachieving high-schooler. We observe Stalin grappling with the death of his young, beautiful wife. We see Hitler’s mother mourning the loss of three young children—and determined that her first son to survive infancy would find his place in the world. The purpose isn’t to excuse or simply explain these horrible men, but rather to treat them with the empathy they themselves too often lacked. We may prefer to hold such lives at arm’s length so as to demonize them at will, but this book reminds us that these monstrous rulers were also human beings—and perhaps more relatable than we’d like.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

Author: Sophia A. McClennen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317696271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 997

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover: subjects, with pieces on subjectivity, humanity, identity, gender, universality, the particular, the body forms, visiting the different ways human rights stories are crafted and formed via the literary, the visual, the performative, and the oral contexts, tracing the development of the literature over time and in relation to specific regions and historical events impacts, considering the power and limits of human rights literature, rhetoric, and visual culture Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship. Contributors: Chris Abani, Jonathan E. Abel, Elizabeth S. Anker, Arturo Arias, Ariella Azoulay, Ralph Bauer, Anna Bernard, Brenda Carr Vellino, Eleni Coundouriotis, James Dawes, Erik Doxtader, Marc D. Falkoff, Keith P. Feldman, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Audrey J. Golden, Mark Goodale, Barbara Harlow, Wendy S. Hesford, Peter Hitchcock, David Holloway, Christine Hong, Madelaine Hron, Meg Jensen, Luz Angélica Kirschner, Susan Maslan, Julie Avril Minich, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Greg Mullins, Laura T. Murphy, Hanna Musiol, Makau Mutua, Zoe Norridge, David Palumbo-Liu, Crystal Parikh, Katrina M. Powell, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Mark Sanders, Karen-Magrethe Simonsen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Sharon Sliwinski, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, Sarah G. Waisvisz, Belinda Walzer, Ban Wang, Julia Watson, Gillian Whitlock and Sarah Winter.

Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing

Author: Helena Grice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136604855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian/American history. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have recently become the subject of intense American cultural scrutiny, namely China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean American war and its legacy; the era of Japanese geisha culture and its subsequent decline; and China’s one-child policy and the rise of transracial, international adoption in its wake. Grice examines and accounts for this cultural and literary preoccupation, exploring the corresponding historical-political situations that have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America.