http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/books/escape-from-camp-14-by-blaine-harden.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/books/escape-from-camp-14-... “In writ

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/books/escape-from-camp-14-by-blaine-harden.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/books/escape-from-camp-14-... “In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him,” Mr. Harden writes understandably in “Escape From Camp 14.” Mr. Harden tries to fathom a cryptic, troubled and not entirely sympathetic young man whose circumstances lend themselves to exaggeration. What’s more, the new book uses dialogue borrowed from Mr. Shin’s disingenuous 2007 version. “Escape From Camp 14” also includes simple line drawings (as Mr. Shin’s book had) that give the most traumatic parts of his story — torture, imprisonment, maiming, executions — the look of action comics. The most benign of these pictures carries this caption: “Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.” (...) Mr. Shin did not spend his imprisonment missing love, joy, civilization or comfort, because he had never experienced such things. As the spawn of a “reward marriage” — considered “the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching” — he had no real family ties. The book says that he regarded his mother as a rival for food and was right to do so; she once beat him with a hoe for eating her lunch. As a young child, he saw schoolmates maimed or even killed for minor transgressions and he learned to obey the camp’s totalitarian rules. (...) But “Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness,” Mr. Harden writes in typically plain, forthright style. “He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.”