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But an oft-forgotten aspect is the hellish suffering imposed upon an estimated 200,000 civilians who have been consigned to miserable existences in these camps. That he hailed from a family of pro-Workers' Party Koreans makes his story all the more ironic.His detailed description of the hardships of life in the camps - extremely dirty inmates, eating rats - will provide insight into a level of brutality that the western world believed gone after the fall of the Soviet Union and the abolishment of the gulags; a type of cruelty that most westerners thought would never be repeated after the liberation of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau.North Korea-related news have been frequent in American prime time news over recent years - the North Korean nuclear tests, the six-party talks, etc. "The Aquariums of Pyongyang" will horrify you, but it will remind you of the limitless capacity of man to bestow unspeakable cruelty on his own kind. I read this book years ago. It's very easy to read, and it can easily be read in one day.Kang Chul-Hwan has become a famous advocate for North Korean rights and a diligent critic of the North Korean goverment's brutal treatment of its citizens.
You can find some fragments of this book in a few of his articles. This is a well written, first person account of life of a North Korean (DPRK) boy who grew up as the son of ethnic Koreans who moved to North Korea from Japan after World War II. It may also be of interest to ethnic Koreans living outside Korea to understand the conditions of life in North Korea. I recommend this book for readers, students, and researchers interested in North Korea, human rights, communist ideology, history, or government. The boy's grandfather makes an unknown mistake and the entire family is condemned to life at Yodok - a DPRK re-education or work camp. The grim stories of this young man struggling to survive and while surrounded by death and suffering gives the reader a first hand account of North Korean-style communism.The author, since his escape, has studied and become a journalist in South Korea, writing for the Choson Ilbo newspaper.
It's as if you're reading about someone's worst nightmare, and proves that sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.Recommend this to anyone of a mature age that needs a newfound perspective on life. I don't know how the author was able to account for his experience in such detail (keeping in mind that he was simply trying to survive the daily torture, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and disease in the camp), but the book will leave you speechless. Not to make light of the book, but if you think you have problems. Having been deployed to South Korea, I thought I had heard and read almost everything there is about North Korea. Yet, what westerners, even South Koreans don't know about the North Korean labor camp system can literally fill a book.
I picked it up mostly because of those two American women journalists who had just been released from a North Korean prison a couple days before, and I thought it would be, at the very least, relevant to world events. I had no idea. I think of where I was during this same time. I read each page enthralled by this man's heroism and resolve during this time of horrific injustice.I was drawn in by what I found most unexpected, and couldn't help being fascinated by the author's amazing struggle for survival. Then one day the police stormed their house, and placed all the family, except the author's mother, in the Yodok prison in the wilderness and mountains for a ten-year sentence, facing brutal treatment, inhumane living conditions, and severe malnutrition. I thought, well, maybe I'll educate myself on the basics and then skim the details.
And that this very thing occurs today I can't fully comprehend. Book Review: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten years in the North Korean gulag, by Kang Chol-Hwan I thought this book might be a hard read. The Aquariums of Pyongyang chronicles the life of the author as a boy who, at the age of nine, was wrongfully imprisoned with his family in a North Korean concentration camp. A country of severe poverty and militarism, they were slowly and systematically stripped of their possessions.
It was nothing of the sort. What they found there shocked them. Thankfully. This book serves its purpose well in bringing attention to the oppression and isolation to North Koreans, and gives a voice to a nation of people whose voice has been taken away from them by a ruthless dictatorship.
That it was real. What struck me most was that this family weren't anti-communists, weren't revolutionaries who were bent on overthrowing the government. I breathed relief every time he triumphed over each adversity.I kept having to set my book down for a minute and grasp the fact that this wasn't a story from the 1940's, with lessons of history learned from the Holocaust, but that it was the 1980's and 90's. Not exactly most people's choice for summer reading.
His terrible ordeals were well written, but told in such a way that it made it not too burdensome or gruesome for the reader to bear. They chose North Korea based on the images that Kim Sung-Il projected to the world of a thriving communist lifestyle. I didn't. Instead, they were communists, originally North Korean, but drawn back from settling in Japan with the hope of an even better life in North Korea.
But while I was abroad, I began it and could scarcely put it down, even though my itinerary left little time for other activities. It's certainly not Solzhenytsin's "Gulag Archipalego," but it is a worthy work in its own right and well worth the read. I bought it for the long flight from SFO to ICN a few weeks ago.
It is an expose of the mind and operations of one third of G. I may add to this review once I have finished the book. Bush's "Axis of Evil," a fitting appellation for a government that keeps its own population deprived, not only of the truth of its own malevalence and the truth of the world at large, but of life's most basic necessities, not to mention the simple human desire for freedom of thought and movement.I read a review downplaying the author's writing style as "wanting." Nevertheless, I found it rather powerful and poignant.
I have only read half of the book. It is a tale of hopes and expectations, of fears and revelations, of degradation and emancipation. But suffice it to say that I am glad to have found it; it has earned a permanent place on my shelf.
I didn't read much of it during the flight. Now that I am home, I will soon complete the book.As I said, I could scarcely put the book down; it is an engrossing account of a family's suffering at the hands of the brutal North Korean regime.
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