Buy this book with Crossing the Line DVD ~ Christian Slater today!

Buy Together Today: $43.46

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Chol-hwan Kang  (50)  $10.85

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings  (26)  $23.10

North of the Dmz: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea by Andrei Lankov  (2)  $35.96

Inside North Korea by Mark Edward Harris  (2)  $23.10

National Geographic - Inside North Korea  (18)  $16.99

› Explore similar items : Books (43) Movies & TV (6)

From The New Yorker
In January, 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in South Korea. Sure that he was about to be sent to Vietnam, he drank ten beers, abandoned his patrol, and crossed into North Korea. He spent the next four decades in a country that had become "a giant, demented prison," until the Japanese government secured his release, along with that of his Japanese wife, who had been abducted by the North Koreans. Jenkins’s book is oddly compelling. The blank ordinariness of his character brings out the moral and physical ugliness of life in North Korea, where soldiers steal and beg for food; a dog digs up a fresh mass grave (and the next day all the dogs in the neighborhood are shot); and Jenkins awakens to the bleak, deadening realization that his two daughters are being groomed as spies. "I would always tell them, ‘we are not in the real world. This is not the real world,’" Jenkins writes of his daughters. "But they didn’t believe me."
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

Product Description
In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.

See all Editorial Reviews

Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Surprise Me!

Search Inside This Book: