Rating: 
Summary: A most important, quick read about North Korea's gulag
Review: This book may be neither great literature or deep political science analysis, but it offers a grueseome insider's view of what goes on inside North Korea's gulag camps. The author's story is terrible indeed, but he manages to write from a humanistic point of view and also comes up with highly revealing details about "normal" political life in North Korea - observations about the hypocrisy, corruption, and occasional humanitarian instincts of officials ignorings their orders etc.
Rating:
Summary: excellent.
Review: this book was everything I hoped it would be. it was a sad story, but its words were not simlply used up in emotions. as I finished up the book, it really even inspired me to take action regarding north korea. how? that I don't know, but somehow. perhaps I should contact my congressman or find out about some agencies working with north korean refugees.the stories about the camp were horrifying at times and well-written about. the flow of the middle chapters was not perfect, but its content, not to mention the rest of the book, totally made up for it. the chapters at the very beginning and the very end were especially good, particularly his description of his "happy childhood in pyongyang" and adjusting to life in south korea. excellent book worth my time. if you have any kind of interest in east asia or north korea in particular, you should definitely read this.
Rating: 
Summary: You will thank God you live where you live (anywhere but NK)
Review: This book will stun you. A previous reviewer made mention of the Wild Boar and he's right some of the tales about the Wild Boar will make you laugh. But this book is not a comedy. This book is a story of a family who viewed North Korea as the paradise destination. Ethnic Koreans who lived and prospered in Japan they were inticed back to Pyongyang, to return 'home'. The wild boar is not a animal with four legs. He is an human animal,the nickname prison guard in the hell that the family found themselves. His particular cruelty to the family and anyone else is rooted in a love of the (now deceased) Great Leader. To hear people so desperate to escape the country that they would leave their own families behind to face the consequences. Cannibalism, the death, the dulling of human senses. Its an amazing story. This book is not horror show. Its not a gory death book with minutia details of pain. Rather it tells an awful story but it is in fact a story of how the human being can overcome. incredible adversity. You will admire this man and his story. You will also appreciate where you live. This book is well worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: You will thank God you live where you live (anywhere but NK)
Review: This book will stun you. A previous reviewer made mention of the Wild Boar and he's right some of the tales about the Wild Boar will make you laugh. But this book is not a comedy. This book is a story of a family who viewed North Korea as the paradise destination. Ethnic Koreans who lived and prospered in Japan they were inticed back to Pyongyang, to return 'home'. The wild boar is not a animal with four legs. He is an human animal,the nickname prison guard in the hell that the family found themselves. His particular cruelty to the family and anyone else is rooted in a love of the (now deceased) Great Leader. To hear people so desperate to escape the country that they would leave their own families behind to face the consequences. Cannibalism, the death, the dulling of human senses. Its an amazing story. This book is not horror show. Its not a gory death book with minutia details of pain. Rather it tells an awful story but it is in fact a story of how the human being can overcome. incredible adversity. You will admire this man and his story. You will also appreciate where you live. This book is well worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: An important testimony
Review: This is a must-read, an important testimony of life under an absolutist regime. It is part of a steady stream of testimonials that are finally appearing about what the self-proclaimed "Communist" regimes are actually like inside. I hope that the American academics will start paying attention to these testimonials, and accept the fact that those communist regimes should not have been idealized as they were (and still are by some!). Only after an honest scrutiny of these so-called communist societies and how they ALL turned into dictatorships, can the left recover its intellectual force.
Rating:
Summary: An important testimony
Review: This is a must-read, an important testimony of life under an absolutist regime. It is part of a steady stream of testimonials that are finally appearing about what the self-proclaimed "Communist" regimes are actually like inside. I hope that the American academics will start paying attention to these testimonials, and accept the fact that those communist regimes should not have been idealized as they were (and still are by some!). Only after an honest scrutiny of these so-called communist societies and how they ALL turned into dictatorships, can the left recover its intellectual force.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth buying.
Review: This is a very poorly written book. To be fair, it could be that the book suffers from a double translation: from Korean to French, then from French to English. It could also be that the book seems to have been dictated (during meetings with the original French translator), then put into narrative form. Nevertheless, the prose itself is rambling, unfocused, and full of interludes, both long and short, that lead nowhere. The information about the North Korean "gulag" system (if one can appropriate this term for hard-labor camps outside the USSR) is really nothing new. It certainly nothing that isn't publicly available on one of the many, excellent on-line journals documenting human rights abuses in North Korea (i.e. nkhumanrights.or.kr). Really , this presents very few insights. What is interesting, however, is the author's description of his nostalgic, childhood views of life in Pyongyang, and the efficacy with which children are brainwashed to worship Kim Il-sung and his son. It is also informative to read about the rampant corruption in North Korea, which the author learns to manipulate after his release from the "gulag," as well as the mundane, everyday violence born of the ennui of North Korean life. Apart from that, there ain't much to recommend it. Since these passages represent maybe 10% of the book's 200-plus pages, the reader would be much better served by skiming the book at the library, rather than adding this title to his library.
Rating:
Summary: from the belly of the beast
Review: This isn't literature on the scale of "The Gulag Archipelago," and there are some misspellings, but so what? It's a highly accessible and moving account of one person's experiences in the North Korean prison camp system and his escape. It is hard for me to imagine a reader who reading this book would not learn something about North Korea or the human spirit. Bravo to the authors for putting out this memoir.
Rating:
Summary: Unusual prison tale with chilling immediacy
Review: This story gives us an inside view of the horrors of prison life, and life on the "outside," in the DPRK (North Korea). In spite of a slightly unpolished translation, the writing is clearly understandable, and I found the story entrancing. It is not at all like wading through scholarly journals to get the same information, as one less-than-enthusiastic reviewer has written. I have studied North Korea for over ten years, and would recommend this book as a good introduction to the brutality of the regime.
There are two oddities. The title refers to the author's boyhood fish collection, and I am not sure why that title was chosen. The cover has a picture of a large assemblage of weeping and tearful children, all in unform. It looks like a mass mourning organized upon the death of Kim Il-Sung, but nowhere is there a credit or a reference to this picture, so a reader without previous knowledge might be puzzled by it.
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