Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden · 256 pages

The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk. In Escape From C

A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power

Paul Fischer · 353 pages

"A nonfiction thriller packed with tension, passion, and politics, [this book] offers a rare glimpse into a secretive world, illuminating a fascinating chapter of North Korea's history that helps explain how it became the hermetically sealed, intensely stage-managed country it remains today"--Amazon.com.

Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee—A Look Inside North Korea

Jang Jin-sung · 368 pages

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

Hyeonseo Lee, David John · 320 pages

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom. As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure t

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot · 264 pages

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Barbara Demick · 314 pages

A remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years--a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape most of us have nev

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

Jenna Miscavige Hill, Lisa Pulitzer · 416 pages

Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, goin

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang · 544 pages

"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

Bradley K. Martin · 888 pages

"Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea's ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Lifting Pyongyang's curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book takes readers inside a society that to a Westerner may appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctr

The Complete Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi · 352 pages

From inside front cover: The story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a ... loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a coutnry plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, fina

The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson · 456 pages

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Azar Nafisi · 368 pages

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Anna Funder

A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea

Eunsun Kim, Sebastien Falletti · 228 pages

"Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country--despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated ... Her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea

Lady Hyegyeong · 329 pages

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · 207 pages

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad

Melanie Kirkpatrick · 362 pages

It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad. With a journalist's grasp of events and a novelist's ear

So Far from the Bamboo Grove

Yoko Kawashima Watkins · 192 pages

Stars Between the Sun and Moon: One Woman's Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom

Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland · 288 pages

"An incredible memoir of North Korea by a woman who defied the government to keep her family alive. Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household--her parents worked in the factories and the family scraped by on rationed rice and a small garden. Nightly, she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. But it was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine resulting in

If I Perish

Esther Ahn Kim · 350 pages

Ahn Ei Sook stood alone among thousands of kneeling people in bold defiance of the tyrannical command to bow to a pagan Japanese shrine. After months on the run, she was captured and condemned to a living death in the filth and degradation of a Japanese prison. Although she was imprisoned and tormented for many years, her determination and fortitude never diminished. In spite of the brutality, opp

Under the Same Sky: A Memoir of Survival, Hope, and Faith

Joseph Kim, Stephan Talty · 273 pages

"A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage Inside the hidden and mysterious world of North Korea, Joseph Kim lived a young boy's normal life until he was five. Then disaster struck: the first wave of the Great Famine, a long, terrible

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Michel Foucault · 333 pages

In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 712 pages

Into the Shadows

Glenn Beck, Harriet Parke · 323 pages

"It was once called America, but now it is just 'the Republic.' Following the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, the once-proud people of America have become obedient residents who live in barren, brutal Compounds and serve the autocratic, merciless Authorities"--Jacket. When the Authorities took her mother away, Emmeline started questioning the world around her. Are t