North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its
leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent
opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal
concentration camps for ?re-education.? Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of
one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the
extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in
North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part
political tract, this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an
ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history.