Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s
Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. By Blaine
Harden. Viking. $26.95.
Summer of ’68: The Season That
Changed Baseball, and America, Forever. By Tim Wendel. Da Capo. $25.
Some stories are
almost too painful to tell, which is one reason it is important to tell
them. Blaine Harden, whose credits
include PBS’ Frontline, The Economist
and The Washington Post, tells one of
them in Escape from Camp 14, the
story of Shin Dong-Hyuk. Shin was born
in 1982 in one of the camps whose existence North Korea refuses to acknowledge:
vast political prison camps where families are confined for crimes, real or
imagined, against the state, and where children are born, raised and die. North Korea is a “basket case state,” Harden
writes, but that has scarcely kept it from sealing its borders, developing
nuclear weapons and threatening its neighbor to the south – and the peace of
the world. These are large issues,
though. Harden refers to them often, but
it is the smaller story of Shin’s life and escape that he tells with chilling
detail. Indeed, pretty much all the
details of life in Camp 14 are chilling.
At age 16, after graduating from secondary school, Shin is deemed an
adult and ready to be assigned to his lifetime occupation. It will probably be in the coal mines, where
60% of his class will go and “where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions,
and gas poisonings was common.” But no:
in a rare instance of good fortune, Shin is assigned instead to “the ranch,”
which is good because “nowhere else in Camp 14 was there so much food to
steal.” Even before getting this
assignment, Shin was luckier than some: one of the armed camp guards who served
as teachers beat a six-year-old to death with a chalkboard pointer. Shin’s mother and brother planned to escape
from Camp 14; they were caught, his brother shot and his mother hanged. Then Shin, age 13 at the time, was held and
tortured for seven months as guards sought more information on the planned
escape. How did he survive? “A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was
a complete absence of expectations,” writes Harden. That is certainly believable, but a few
things that he writes are harder to accept.
For example, during his torture and interrogation by guards with whom he
has collaborated and in a system where he knows he must respond when asked
questions by those in authority, Shin is on the verge of death before he
reveals that it was he himself who had told the night guard about the family’s
escape plans – he had been raised as an informer – and that a classmate could
confirm the story. It is clear why Shin
would betray his family, but not why he would allow himself to be tortured to
the verge of death (including being roasted over a tub of burning charcoal and
developing pus-filled, deeply infected blisters all over his back) before
saying words that would exonerate him. Harden
discusses the geopolitical realities of North Korea in the context of the
horrors of Shin’s life, pointing out, for example, the contrast between the
statements of proud independence of the late “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and the
reality of a country that “even in the best of years…cannot feed itself.” A few of Harden’s remarks fall victim to the
pace of book production compared with that of world events, such as his
discussion of North Korea’s plans for world power by 2012 – plans that have
obviously not come to fruition. By and
large, though, Harden stays focused on Shin as both a microcosm and a symbol of
North Korea, contrasting the world that Shin discovered after successfully
running away with the one he had known from birth: “His context had been
twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot
his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to
death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire.” This is a tale of terror escaped, and of
terror remaining for the populace not only of Camp 14 but also of all of North
Korea. It is the story of how one person
got out – not without adjustment difficulties, some of them serious – but how
many more, nearly all the rest, cannot.
It is a very difficult and unpleasant book to read, and the optimism at
its conclusion is understandably muted. There
is uplift here, but even more, there is a sense that the existence of these
horrors is almost beyond understanding – and the reader’s utter inability to do
anything about them makes the book extremely depressing despite its attempt at
a positive conclusion.
Harden’s
straightforward narrative in Escape from
Camp 14 makes the story harrowing enough.
Tim Wendel tries to do something more complicated in Summer of ’68, but with considerably
less success. Primarily a baseball
writer, Wendel wants in this book to draw parallels between changes in the game
and the dislocations in American society in the same year, 1968. Nothing the United States endured in that
turbulent year comes close to what Shin went through – and others still go
through – in North Korea, but the fact that the events happened close to home
and will still be remembered by at least some readers (or their families) lends
Summer of ’68 an immediacy that Escape from Camp 14 lacks. However, Wendel’s book simply tries too hard
to make professional baseball – a big-money sport whose outcomes are entirely
irrelevant to the lives of most people, no matter how fanatical they may be as
fans – the linchpin of a story about violence and dislocation throughout
American society. It doesn’t work,
largely because readers will quickly notice Wendel giving short shrift to
sociopolitical matters in his haste to get into details of baseball games and
players. For example, he tries talking
about Martin Luther King Jr. as a man who “certainly understood the power of
sports” and “was a supporter of boxer Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali.” But he seems much more interested in
detailing how, after King was assassinated, “the 76ers continued their newfound
[basketball] dominance, winning a league-best sixty-two games and finishing
eight games ahead of Boston in the Eastern Division.” He writes of the aftermath of the Detroit
riots, but sees things through the lens of the fans of baseball’s Tigers: “With
the victory, [Denny] McLain became the first American League pitcher to win
twenty-six games since Bob Feller and Hal Newhouser in 1946.” Wendel’s comfort zone is baseball, not
societal upheaval. Fans of the game will
enjoy the detailed reporting that Wendel brings to the season: “With Detroit
holding an early 2-0 lead, the Tigers’ Dick McAuliffe drew a walk off Washburn
to open the top of the third. Stanley
followed with a single and Kaline brought McAuliffe around with another
single. That marked a disappointing end
to Washburn’s day as he was replaced by Larry Jaster. The left-hander had posted a 9-13 record in
1968, with a respectable 3.51 ERA.” But
those same fans will find this at best a (+++) book because of the digressions
– they do seem like digressions – into events unrelated to baseball. Potential readers who are not baseball fans
will learn nothing about American history in 1968 that has not been told often,
and more effectively, elsewhere, and will give the book no rating at all. It is really not for them; indeed, it is a
little bit difficult to decide just what the target audience for Summer of ’68 really is.
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