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List Price: $21.95
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Product Details:
Type: Hardcover
Item#: c6813
ISBN#: 0465011055
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The terrifying memoir praised by President Bush
Exclusive Club hardcover edition -- NOT AVAILABLE IN STORES!
The Aquariums of Pyongyang
by Kang Chol-hwan
The first escapee from a North Korean concentration camp tells his story: "A chilling testimony . . . freezes the heart and seizes the soul." -- Kirkus Review
"On June 13, 2005, I met with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office for forty long minutes. I told the president about the plight of North Korean people, and we shared sincere opinions on how to save them. . . . I now realize that the Lord wanted to use President Bush to let the blind world see what is happening to His people in North Korea. With one simple stroke of God's finger, the bleak reality, in which nearly no one cared about the ghosts of three million famished souls and hundreds of thousands more in the concentration camps in my home country, was instantly changed." -- From the new preface
(continued from above)
President George W. Bush does not recommend books lightly. Which is why The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag made headlines recently when President Bush not only praised the book, but held a private, 40-minute meeting with the author, Kang Chol-hwan. North Korea's propaganda reacted by calling Kang "human scum," and saying his encounter with Bush was "an act of throwing a wet blanket" on efforts to resume nuclear talks.
In The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang, the first survivor of a North Korean concentration camp to escape the "hermit kingdom," tells his story to the world. The book's title derives from his hobby of tending fish before he was sent to prison along with his family at age nine. Kang's last aquarium made it onto the truck transporting him and his family to the prison camp at Yodok, about 70 miles northwest of Pyongyang. Thus began ten years of internment.
In prison, Kang suffered beatings and torture, hauled logs in forced labor, buried dead prisoners, and ate mice, bugs and live salamanders to supplement his diet. Some other highlights of this bone-chilling memoir:
- How, in July 1977, Kang's grandfather was accused of high treason for running a small capitalist enterprise to relieve the family's grinding poverty under Communism
- How his grandfather's "crime" resulted in the removal of the entire family -- except Kang's mother, the daughter of a "heroic family" -- taken to the concentration camp of Yodok
- How Kang's pro-revolutionary grandmother was greeted inside the prison by a fellow communist organizer who bemoaned, "And now you're here like me. After all we did for the party."
- Hard labor all day for adults; for children, a half day after a morning of indoctrination school
- The indoctrination teachers: ruthless sadists who inflicted beatings and other punishments that sometimes resulted in death -- they killed one child by beating him until he fell into a septic tank
- How everything in the camp (and the nation) was organized around the cult of dictator Kim il-Sung and his son, Kim Jong-il
- How Kang was kicked unconscious for forgetting to wear his "good" socks to visit the room containing Kim Il-sung's picture
- Rats: the "only food supply in camp that was never in short supply." How Kang learned to grill them to save himself and his sister from starvation
- Biweekly "criticism and self-criticism" sessions: part of the brutal process of ideological reeducation
- Public executions -- and postmortem stonings
- The "sweatbox": one of the harshest punishments imaginable -- yet often used for the most trifling offenses. Why many prisoners didn't make it out alive
- How many inmates were simply driven mad with suffering
- How suicide was discouraged by punishing families
- "A mad person could say just about anything" -- except if it was critical of Kim Il-sung, in which case the mental patient and his family could pay with their lives
- How Kang eventually escaped to South Korea via China to give testimony to the hardships and atrocities still being suffered by up to 200,000 people in the gulags
"A book that ought to be much more famous than it is." -- Christopher Hitchens, Salon.com
"The Aquariums of Pyongyang is one of the most terrifying memoirs I have ever read. As the first such account to emerge from North Korea, it is destined to become a class." -- Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking
"A triumph against silence. . . . The beaming Kim Jong-il is still in power and Yodok is still in existence, in full working order, at this moment. Just to read The Aquariums of Pyongyang is an assault against these facts." -- Financial Times
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Not Rated EUGENE D WISDOM
can't be trusted to deal with the West openly. This is a very moving portrait of the character of life in Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Those who seek to make agreements with this truly rogue state should read this to understand the truly malevolent spirit of that regime. This is the story of a CHILD in the Korean GULAG.
This moving narrative casts a bright light on what is clearly a dirty little secret of leftists around the world: the gulags and death camps rivaling the worst created under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pott still exist and are as oppressive as ever. I would challenge that self-described "closet communist" turned apologist for Jim Jong-Il's criminal cabal, Ted Turner to have an open public discussion with Kang Chol-hwan on the topic of oppression and tyranny in Kim's North Korea. Mr. Turner is ill equipped (intellectually or in direct experience) to have such a discussion, so the point is purely rhetorical.
My wife is a naturalized US Citizen who is from the Republic of Korea, and was a young child during the worst days of the Korean War, so she saw the brutality of the North Korean communist forces first hand. She also related stories of North Korean infiltrators who would slip into the south long after the war to exact revenge people who were originally from the north but fled to the south (as did her father and his siblings). The brutality of the indoctrinated automatons of the north is undisputable. This narrative confirms the worst suspicions we all had about the hell on Earth that is the existence of the average North Korean, facts hidden by five decades of ruthless dictatorship. The courage of Mr. Kang in his escape to the free world is amazing; especially in light of the fact that a failed escape attempt is almost certainly a death sentence in Kim's North Korea.
If there is a lesson in this excellent work, it is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the ordeal of the North Korean people at the hands of their "Dear Leader" is all too typical of states where there is no accountability of the government to the governed. The idea that communism (or any other form of government that holds a leader and his government unaccountable to the people) can somehow be benevolent and allow people to prosper and flourish is tragically laughable. The privilege and extravagance enjoyed by Kim and his cronies is paid for with the blood of their countrymen; I would hope that someday in the no too distant future, the people of North Korea will find a way to rise up and take their God given rights back from this madman.
Mr. Kang risked everything to escape to the West and tell this story - we owe it to him and the millions who didn't make it out to read this account and contemplate what is going on in North Korea this very second.
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