The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Jim Frederick (Author)
Key Phrases: high cadre, North Korea, United States, South Korea (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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."
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Review

"One of the most important and devastating accounts of life inside a totalitarian society."--Commentary

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520253337
• ISBN-13: 978-0520253339
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #386,701 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through the North Korean Looking Glass and Back Again, March 3, 2008

By	William D. Geerhart (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A much longer review of this book will be posted on CONELRAD.com in the coming days, but I wanted to urge everyone with an interest in the mysterious world of North Korea to buy this book immediately. It is an unprecedented opportunity to read an uncensored account of what life is like in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea by an American who lived there for nearly forty years. This is not a boring academic text. It is a riveting and, at times, mind-bending tale of endurance that is almost impossible to put down.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In a way, a happy ending, April 30, 2008

By	JYK (Washington State) - See all my reviews

I picked up the book out of curiosity and now am glad that I read it. Before reading the book, I thought of him as a strange man who defected to North Korea of all places, lived the good life as the token trophy, and now decided that he had had enough. I now feel more sympathy for his plight as he's revealed as a man whose momentary stupidity consigned him to forty years in hell. I was touched by his courtship of his wife, who was even more grievously wronged (at least he walked in with his two feet), and am glad to know that they are doing well in their new lives in Japan. A fascinating personal glimpse into the most isolated, brainwashed place in the world.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Harrowing Tale of Desertion and Redemption, April 4, 2008

By	Rokodera (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

The Reluctant Communist is the harrowing tale of Charles Robert Jenkins' life in North Korea following his desertion from the US Army in 1965. The story is bookended with an exposition of his life before desertion and his ultimate escape in 2003 and new life in Japan.

On the book's cover, we see Jenkins staring out from the cover of the Reluctant Communist with a near-expressionless face that belies the gripping tale he tells inside. It's part biography, part confession, part travelogue, part political history, part prodigal son, and ALL thriller. The work brings to vivid life the struggle of the individual against a profoundly evil socialist state.

Jenkins teamed with Jim Frederick of Time to write the book. The co-author manages to keep himself in the background for most of the story, limiting himself to the Foreword and to organizing Jenkins' tale into a coherent whole. To his credit, Frederick's discipline helps to retain the plain talk of Jenkins and lend the story an authentic voice, while still moving the story forward at a nice clip.

Frederick, hailing from Time Magazine, stumbles once when he inserts gratuitous references to America's racist past in the passages leading up to the desertion. But, thankfully, this PC irrelevancy isn't enough to veer the story over the cliff, and is redeemed by everything that follows.

The book could have benefited from a few maps, photos, and/or sketches to personalize the story. Without doubt, there is atill an untold but related story of Japanese abductees. One hopes Frederick will tackle that next, since he glosses over this here. But, these are quibbles in an otherwise gripping yarn. Do not miss this book!