Escape From Camp 14 (2012)

Author: Blaine Harden | Page Count: 210

A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.

And so Shin's misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn't trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.

Escape From Camp 14 tells the true story of a North Korean man Shin Dong-hyuk as he was born in a political prisoner labor camp, his life growing up inside and his eventual escape from the camp and North Korea. The hardships that he faced are some of the worst crimes against human rights that can be imagined. I felt a sort of disconnect at first like I was reading a history similar to the holocaust or stories of Russian gulags; terrible but with a distance that time and historical perspective brings. The author and Shin however stress in the text how North Korea has perpetrated among the cruelest and most long running campaigns of human rights violations ever that is still going on right now and how it is allowed to continue by a clusterfuck of politics, denial, conspiracy and apathy.

That is the point, but the tale itself is more personal as it relates to Shin. He is one of many who were trained from birth to be subservient to authority with no cause towards things like human dignity and integrity as well as the physical hardships of forced slave labor, malnutrition, starvation and murder. Things like respect and love were not even foreign concepts; they didn't exist at all. When his mother and brother are executed for a planned escape, Shin is forced to watch and won't meet his mother's  eye not because he can't bear the sight of her death, but because he was angry at her for putting him in danger by escaping. She was his mother only by fact she birthed him, but there was no love. She was just a person and competitor for food who would beat him when he stole her lunch. Even his eventual escape wasn't prodded on by some grandiose uprising of the human spirit within him. He escaped because he was tired of being hungry and heard from an outside prisoner that grilled meat was particularly good.

A fascinating look at a personal tale behind North Korea's cloak that gives some insight to international geopolitics and the perhaps unseen side of the strength of human spirit.

5 spit roasted rats out of 5

Looking For Alaska (2005)

Author: John Green | Page Count: 221

"Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage, and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."

Miles has grown fed up with his Florida high school where he has no friends and, with the help of his habit of memorizing famous people's last words, convinces his parents to let him transfer to a more prestigious boarding school. Despite failing to reinvent his antisocial personality, he gains some new friends and is introduced to and immediately falls in love with Alaska; a beautiful and buxom girl who is everything he is not. She is fearless and impulsive and prone to rash behavior and mood swings. Through her and his new friends he just may manage to break out of his shell and learn more about himself.

The writing is solid with some likeable and interesting characters though I found Miles partly insufferable and his devotion to Alaska felt rushed. Maybe I just read the book too fast, but the time it takes place in is too short to inspire the lifelong love Miles says his infatuation has become. Or maybe that is partly the point as despite his intellectual aptitude he is still an inexperienced teenager in his existential crises, adolescent adventures and hilarious sexual encounters. The "controversial" sexual content isn't, but it is good at conveying what it was meant to and anyone who objects to it must not realize that teenagers somewhere are having sexy times right now. The introspective thoughts and themes still make this flawed book a great read that is worth dissecting and digesting.

4 Homicidal Swans out of 5

Survival in Auschwitz (1958)

Author: Primo Levi | Page Count: 187

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine... that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly.

Survival in Auschwitz first appeared in English as If This Is A Man. Translated from its original italian, it tells the story of the author Primo Levi's capture, transfer to Auschwitz and subsequent liberation from it. He describes the inhuman treatment of the "haftlings"( the word for prisoner) by not only the nazis, but also fellow prisoners either out of the same racist views of the time, to possibly gain favor and privilege or just as a means to help themselves. The latter of which he didn't seem to hold against them given the circumstances and as it was a behavior he also participated in.

Levi actually doesn't beat the reader over the head with how it was horrible and how the reader should feel. He simply states clearly the events that transpired and lets the reader think about it as if he doesn't want pity or sympathy, but rather just to tell the story. There is even a running theme about how the physical stress, as bad as it was with disease, malnutrition and inadequate...everything, wasn't as bad as the dehumanization. Being told they were less than human and then forced to prove them right by having to embrace it for survival by stealing from fellow prisoners, loss of compassion for a struggling worker because it only slows down their work and other moments that he felt nothing for at the time and only much later remembered clearly enough to feel regret.
His prose is clear and concise, but still affecting and insightful. A very good read.

4 Soup and bread rations out of 5