Dining with Squirrels

Another memoir of a child’s life in a North Korean gulag.  The difference between this author, Kang Chol-Hwan, and the author of Escape From Camp 14, Kim Dong-Shuk, is that Kang was born into a faithful Party family that voluntarily moved to North Korea and was sent to the camps with his family when he […]

This is an excellent book and don’t take my word for it.  Journalist Barbara Demick was a National Book Award finalist for it.  She reconstructs the lives of six North Koreans who she met after they escaped to South Korea.  Between the Korean War and 1992, only 923 managed to do that.  923!!!!!  In the […]

I read this in one day and it felt a little like work.  I just felt like I was reading the authors journals in book/fiction form.  Her observations of the minutia of parenthood were very funny, but the store is a wearisome one that I find myself seeing over and over:  mother goes back to […]