Jaw dropping, page turning insanity.
Loved this book from the outset. Great story of life in North Korea.
This and Google Earth are pretty much your only looks into North Korea. A country we should all know more about with its nuclear weapons, and with the hard-to-understand reactor construction in Syria.
This is one of the few books that I was compelled to read through in one sitting. His personal accounts of the life in Yoduk concentration camp are vivid and almost too surreal to believe.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang was one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Difficult in the way that it describes, first hand, the conditions of daily life in the North, not to mention the gulag.
The greatest crime of the West has been to stand by while brutal regimes by Kim Il Sung and others flourish. If there is any charge to level against liberalism in general, it is that as a movement, it has never thought to take brutal and swift action against the Sungs, Mao Tse Tungs, and Stalins of the world.
I have spent quite a bit of time in South Korea this year, and have had discussions with people about reunification. South Koreans see this as absolutely inevitable.
I purchased this book to help me understand the life of a North Korean; by one of their own who could verify the horrors I had heard existed. It is not a lengthy, in detail, or novel like story.
I have recently become very interested in N Korea and what life is like for the average N Korean. This book is a horrifying treasure of information.
This account provides a chilling & insightful view of the lives of the forgotten political prisoners of the N. Korean gulag system , and how these unfortunate prisoners were systematically viewed and treated as little more than "tailless animals".
A tremendous look inside "The Hermit Nation". Chol-Hwan and his editor bring to life the hell on earth that is North Korea and it's brutal prison camps.
I have just finished reading, The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan. Kang Chol-Hwan is one of the first survivors of a North Korean concentration camp to tell the world his story.
The story of K.Chol-Hwan isn't rare.
This book is a first-person account of Kang Chol-Hwan's experience of life in DPRK, 10 yearsof horrific existence in a prison camp, his subsequent adjustment to post-release, and lastly his escape from DPRK. The book is a simple, easy to read narrative (I read it on a lazy Sunday afternoon).
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.
