Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

This nonfiction book is an account of the life of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean man who has the distinction of being the only North Korean born into servitude in a North Korean concentration camp who escaped to the West (or the east, depending on your point of view).

Camp 14 is a very large concentration camp located in the mountains of North Korea.  The North Korean government denies the existence of these camps, but their existence has been verified through satellite photographs.

There are a few former North Koreans who have given accounts of these camps; Shin Dong-Hyuk has the distinction of having escaped from North Korea with very little knowledge of North Korea as a country or of the propaganda surrounding its ruling dynasty and the ruling party.

Blaine Harden, the journalist who wrote this book, presents a narrative that is short, incredibly easy to read, and one in which he seems to strain to be objective.  I think he himself does not know exactly what to make of Shin Dong-Hyuk. Harden resists shaping the narrative.  I admire his integrity and restraint; I found myself feeling a little confused.

Harden clearly feels that Shin Dong-Hyuk may have a credibility problem in the eyes of some readers and goes to great pains to talk about any corroboration our current knowledge of North Korean labor camps gives Dong-Hyuk's report.

As a journalist, he may also be troubled about the difficulty of simply corroborating most of Dong-Hyuk's story, something that would normally not only be relatively easy but not nearly as important.  As it is, Harden and the reader are forced to acknowledge that it's difficult to know if Dong-Hyuk is telling the truth.

On the one hand, the story of his escape is both far-fetched and gruesome.  Its horror seems unlikely.  It's so horrifying that it seems natural to me that some readers would question its veracity.

On the other hand, Dong-Hyuk's account includes admissions so shameful that they support the idea that this is an honest account.  Dong-Hyuk was ignorant of the kind of knowledge of his world that we take for granted.  Nevertheless, he sometimes succeeded in manipulating camp officials to his own personal benefit, so he did not seem innocent.

This book does offer a view of a chaotic society roiled by starvation.  Oddly, I think that had I been asked to guess whether widespread starvation would lead to the collapse of the state, I would have said yes.  North Korea has not collapsed.  (Clearly, I would have been wrong.  Had someone else been present, I'm sure they would have said something like, "You're a very poor student of Irish history," and I would have had to agree.)  I have been wondering, "What's the secret of this dictatorship's success?"  Perhaps it is the combination of manipulation of information and communication so effective it would make Stalin blush, poverty, and lack of education.

Harden asserts that North Korean authorities have at times, during these recent years of famine, permitted black market trading, and even a porous border with China,  He argues that the government's granting of this level of freedom may have been a "safety valve" tactics that removed some of the motivation for unifying against the government.

Harden seems to have become interested in the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk because of the scarcity of any information about North Korea.  Ironically, as Harden points out several times in this account, Dong-Hyuk knew next to nothing about the world outside his labor camp before he escaped and is therefore not in a position to offer much insight about his country or its government.

Remembering Dong-Hyuk's escape I am astounded at his success in undertaking a cross-country journey and crossing the border without being caught and without having much help.  I am astounded at how well and quickly he adapted to life in northeast China (which has a large ethnic Korean population).

This book reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Elie Wiesel's Night.  It also reminded of Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage, which I think was based on a nonfiction account of a doctor to attempted raise a boy who had been found living in the woods as an animal, without human contact.  My recollection is that in real life, the child died before reaching adulthood.

I cannot offer an unbiased opinion of this book myself, however.  I do not enjoy books that recount traumatic events.  In fact, I do not understand their appeal.

Gretchen Rubin talked a little bit about "catastrophe memoirs" in her book, The Happiness Project.  I believe that she viewed them as having a salutary effect and the power to give the reader a greater sense of perspective, as the saying goes, and an appreciation for the comforts and joys of his or her own life.  Interestingly, some of the memoirs she mentioned were memoirs of divorce.

This is a memoir of murder, abuse, corruption, starvation, theft and moral degradation.  Perhaps it could not be termed a "catastrophe memoir".  

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

This is a wonderfully readable and entertaining book. A caveat: Before you start reading it, look up Goebbels and Goring in Wikipedia. Having some sense of them as individuals may make it possible for you to keep them straight while you're reading the book. I'm pretty good at keeping the cast of characters straight in almost anything I read (I didn't struggle with 100 Years of Solitude, for instance) but I was pretty confused here. It's the story of a University of Chicago history professor who became FDR's ambassador to Berlin (a job no one else wanted, it seemed) and that of his daughter, a "free spirit". A few oddities. This is the story of a father and his daughter, though their relationship is not the story told in this book. Mom and Junior don't really figure much in this history. The first year of the Dodds' residency in Berlin is recounted in great detail; the rest of their story is barely summarized. The Dodds are real American characters in both the best and worst ways, I would say. To me, I would say that his ambassadorship gave him an opportunity to do something heroic which ended his career as an ambassador but which he would never had had an opportunity to do had he stayed in Chicago. And, that are many episodes in this book that are chilling. So it's not for everyone. Also, I personally thought that the first two chapters' exposition dragged. Oddly, for all that exposition, I thought that Larson should have offered some definition of the term "Jeffersonian democrat" and considered the question of whether Dodds' work as an ambassador was affected by his self-image.

The Wagon by Martin Preib

I greatly admire Martin Preib's writing. I enjoy the tension between his working life as a police officer and his mental life as an observer and writer.

I found out about it because a friend took a course at the Newberry Library where it, along with City on the Make by Nelson Algren, was one of the assigned texts. This book is a rumination on Preib's work as a Chicago cop, and primarily his work running the "wagon," the vehicle that is called to take dead bodies to the morgue. In Preib's writing he combines a practical account of the work of being a cop with his own emotional inner life, his relation to the city of his birth and his own unanswered questions about some of the choices he's made and places them in the larger context of our literary tradition. I think he perceives a greater need for ceremony and connection.

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

I've been dipping into, in a non-linear way, Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout. I can't quite get a fix on these characters - are they nice? They seem so prickly. No one seems to like each other - And really, who is Eva? Is she unfeeling because she's surrounded by odd, careless, and unconventional people?

 I've read another Elizabeth Bowen novel, The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout reminds me of it in some ways. If you go to her Wikipedia entry, you'll find that that author finds Bowen's work to be frequently concerned with the difference between appearances and the underlying, behind-closed-doors reality.

I think that I don't understand Eva Trout and perhaps, without starting the book at the beginning, reading it all the way to the end, and not leaving anything out, I never shall. Above all, I find it elegaic if the grievers were distracted by traffic and a bad odor coming from an unknown source.

My Modern British Literature professor told me once that he had seen Elizabeth Bowen read (probably at Columbia, where he was a student).  He said that she had a terrible stutter.  "Poor Elizabeth Bowen," he said.

For the first time I have learned that Elizabeth Bowen struggled mightily to make enough money from writing and giving readings to avoid having to sell her father's house.  To me, this is quite a gripping story.  Was it pride that caused her to do everything she could to avoid selling?  Or was it loyalty to him?  How I long to know.  To me, it's quite as thrilling as the Olympics.  

The Last Girls by Lee Smith

This is a charming book by Lee Smith, who was a teacher of Haven Kimmel.

I've also read Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, set in the Appalachians and reflecting Smith's interest in and talent for rendering dialectal speech.

This novel tells the story of five women (and one husband) who decide to recreate a river raft trip, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn, down the Mississippi that they took in college.  This permits them to reflect on the 30 or so years that have passed since then, and allows us to reflect on the diversity of their life stories which reveal some of the profound changes that have taken place in the lives of women in this country since the fifties.

The edition I read was a book club edition (I love these things) with an interview with Smith and book club discussion questions.  In her interview, Smith says that while the new freedom that women of her generation enjoyed gave women much greater freedom and enjoyment of their lives it also placed a certain kind of burden on them:  given more freedom, they were forced to make choices and accept more responsibility for their lives. They lost a certain comfort zone of polite conduct and restraint that their mothers had enjoyed and did not anticipate all of the changes that they would encounter.

Smith is the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Intensive Care," which perfectly captures the language and the changes of how we live now.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I've finally just finished the first chapter, dealing with Steve Eisman, in Michael Lewis' The Big Short.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both Margin Call, which explicitly deals with some of the same issues as those raised by Steve Eisman (the tradition of selling in the financial markets, the contradictory ideas that gave rise to the subprime mortgage debacle, the notion that for the first time, in the securities back by subprime mortgages, you are selling something that has no or very little value), and to Steve Jobs.

At this particular moment, I'm reflecting that some of the charm of this chapter is that Steve Eisman is such an outlier himself:  someone who's abrasive and without manners.  And I'm very interested in him.  Why is it that I find Steve Eisman interesting, and Steve Jobs a fraud?  If I'm honest, I'd have to say that it's hype.  That hype is a powerful tool, and that's why we use it.  But it can have a backlash - that at the same time that it's so persuasive to so many people, there will always be some people who just won't get it, or more accurately, just won't feel it, and will first marvel and then recoil at the enthusiasm of others.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I haven't finished this book yet; in fact, I've just started the chapter called "Restoration," (a great title and absolutely the one I would have chosen for this chapter).

But at this moment I feel moved to make a comment.  I imagined that this book would help to explain why Jobs  was so admired by so many people.  So far, I wouldn't say that the book is really explaining that to me; instead, I find myself wondering why so many people around Jobs allowed themselves to be manipulated by him.

In the place in the book I'm at right now, Gil Amelio has decided to bring Jobs back into the company by buying NeXT.  The reason he did that was because he wanted Apple's software.  But I find that I'm astounded by that decision.  For one thing, I find myself feeling that he should have foreseen that Jobs would want to take over the company and that Jobs' desire to take over the company would create destructive conflict.  It would have been more efficient to simply offer Jobs the title of CEO from the outset if Amelio didn't mind Jobs taking control of Apple.  If he didn't want Jobs to take control of Apple, it seems to me that he should at least have tried to structure the deal differently.

I'm puzzled by how startling the "warts and all" view of Steve Jobs presented here is, given the reverence and real sense of loss when he died.

Trying to make sense of it all, I started to look around at reviews on the web.  Sue Halpern's piece reflects my concerns and I think her answer is correct:  We have such high regard for people who are successful in business:   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false

I think that Isaacson's account emphasizes event and what Jobs has to say about the events of his life and especially his business career.  I'd say that I personally feel a little whipsawed between Jobs' assessment and that of others.  At times Isaacson does address the question of why Jobs is idolized and or identified with - that is, why he's a popstar himself.  Isaacson points out that Jobs saw himself as a rebel and that this idea was the centerpiece of the "1984" ad for the Macintosh.  As I write this, I find myself wondering if my lack of identification with the concept and Jobs' persona is more remarkable than his success.

I still haven't finished the book, but I can't help feeling that a theme, intended or not, is that of failure.  The Lisa was a failure, the Macintosh had many serious problems that prevented it from being as successful as it could have been (lack of storage and lack of processing power), NeXT lost its hardware division and was headed toward bankruptcy or dissolution before it was sold to Apple.  The oft-mentioned "reality distortion field," was clearly helpful in some instances and clearly not in others.  Finally, one thing that I feel that the Macintosh episode showed was that Jobs was clearly interested in the intersection of aesthetics and technology but not as interested as he ought to be in whether and how things worked.  I can't help if he learned the lesson of Detroit auto culture from his father too well, in a sense.  In a world in which there are many brands of a product that work, essentially, equally well, brand differentiation through design, color, and features may seem like everything but it isn't.  The question of how well something meets the needs of the consumer is important, too.

Andrew Sullivan argues that Steve Jobs is important because he fuses the counterculture with what he calls the "counter-counter culture" (presumably, today's young people):

The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. 

All I can say is that right now, I'm still not feeling it.

Reading now

I've just read/skimmed Border Crossing by Pat Barker.  This is the wonderful serendipity of having remaindered and withdrawn books around .. at some point, I find myself surprised by joy or wonder.  I couldn't really recommend this novel because reading it isn't really a good time.  It's about a very dark subject, and the very fact that the protoganist is getting divorced while the action of the novel takes place is no coincidence:  he's struggling with everything including loneliness and disappointment.  His wife moves her furniture out and now his voice is in an empty room.

But I think this book is sublime.  It's beautifully written, and is the reflection, I feel, of a novelist who is deeply thoughtful and deeply curious about the essential nature of things and how that is reflected in how we live now.  Love her.  Simply love her.  (Pat Barker is, of course, the author of the Regeneration trilogy and I highly, highly recommend Regeneration.)

I'm still reading around in Tomalin's Pepys, and I haven't made any progress on Steve Jobs and I know I won't today ..

A week or two ago I began reading True Grit by Charles Portis.  I think this is a wonderful novel.  I think Portis is a masterful realistic novelist, on the basis of the few pages I've read.  More so than almost all of the writers I've read in the past two years, he convincing paints a portrait of a real person in the first few pages.
What's real about her?  She interrupts herself in the middle of telling her tragic, life-changing story to digress and tell the story of an acquaintance that includes a brief summary of his life story and her thoughts about his interesting name.  I would never interrupt a story about my father to tell any other story -- but she would.  That feels real to me.

However, as much as I admire Portis' skill as a novelist, I'm almost certain that I will never care enough about this novel to finish it before it has to go back to the library.  Why?  I don't know .. perhaps if I didn't have to take it back to the library I would eventually finish it.

I am, of course, beginning the Big Short which I enjoy so much, I think, because Lewis' own personality comes through the pages and I find it entertaining and, because, for some reason this is the kind of book I like now.

Margin Call

I really enjoyed this movie, and the core of why it was good was the acting.  It was a wonderful cast (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and the story seemed so real:  it seemed like these were the perfect actors to play these roles.  Something that helped was that the story seemed "ripped from the headlines."  It seemed to be about a company like Lehman Brothers, whose failure caused a lot of losses for a lot of people - because a lot of people held the worthless securities, based on high-risk mortgages, that Lehman and many others held and sold.  The film explored the ethics - or absence thereof - of selling securities that were secured by so little of real value.

I think it's the acting that makes something like this .. that is why Downton Abbey is so successful even though the same territory has been covered before, not only in Gosford Park but in the Shooting Party and the Forsyte Saga, and, most famously, Upstairs Downstairs.

The screenwriter was also the director, and his screenplay won a nomination in the best original screenplay category in this year's Oscar nominations.

There's a scene in which Simon Baker is reading Zachary Quinto's resume, and says, a tone that is more contempt than marveling admiration, "So you're a rocket scientist."  Perfect.

This film seems especially timely in light of the Chase losses.

Moneyball

I saw Moneyball earlier this week on DVD.  (Thank you, Library.)

I want to start out my description of this film with some passionate outburst, to convey enthusiasm and to be persuasive, but my feelings about this film are kind of subdued.

I haven't read the book so I can't say how the screenplay differs from the book.  I have begun reading The Big Short, with which I am already deeply in love, so I'm inclined to think that a) I would probably enjoy Moneyball, too, were I to read it, and that b) Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is probably somewhat faithful to the book.

I guess what I really enjoyed about this film was that Brad Pitt's character, Ben Beame (if that's his name; I'm not sure) was really passionate about winning but he didn't always show his passion; he wasn't given a girlfriend in the screenplay (although he did have a daughter who worried about him and said irreverent things to him).  The drama of the screenplay was chiefly about whether he would succeed using an alternative strategy with has since changed baseball (for the better, I think, but I can't really comment but I'm not really a fan as an adult).

I think Jonah Hill's performance has been praised and it was good.  I felt that it was missing something:  variety, intensity, something.  I do think that an actor has to play the music he's been given and that the role didn't give much scope for the expression of a range of emotions.

I really liked Brad Pitt's performance and liked it so much because it was naturalistic, and so believable.  I like highly realistic movies.  There's a wonderful scene where Pitt, as Beame, lays out the new strategy to the assembled scouts who are giving him their recommendations for new, untried talent with a lot of potential.  I'm guessing that the scouts were not actors but scouts.  But, if they were actors, they sure were good.

Between Men by Fiona Lewis

This novel was published in 1995, and I discovered it because it has an attractive cover which reminded me of Matisse.  (It was a Matisse; it's annoying how sleepy I am, sometimes.)

Alice Wilder is the novel's protagonist, and as she herself would admit, she's in flight from her past, which includes a failed marriage. As a result, she doesn't have much direction or focus and I think this is part of how she comes to find herself, or to see herself as being, "between men." Alice is strangely passive, and torn, in the face of her lovers' behavior; but she sees clearly how unsuitable they both are.

One reviewer complained that the character of the two men is not fleshed out enough; true, but the novel is a tale told from Alice's point of view, and to her I believe both men are rather opaque.

I think it's this novel is a strange-but-understandable hybrid .. a meditation/burlesque on Alice's life and lifestyle.  

When Alice arrives in Los Angeles, she sees herself in flight from her failed marriage.  Her new job at a newspaper as a tremendous gift she's only able to obtain through her father's connections, but one she views  nevertheless as a distraction.  By the end of the novel, she's still very distracted and it seems that the busy surface of her life will prevent her from ever making the art she dreams of .. but, of course, it's in your hand.

The reviewers I read seemed feel this novel was dated or perhaps didn't live up to their expecations for what was, admittedly, only a first novel.  I felt that I perceived a sophisticated comic sensibility underneath the surface of a novel that seemed to be only about how a marginal member of our community lives now.  I'm saddened that Fiona Lewis hasn't written any more novels.  While the world neither needs more novels nor more comics .. wait, I think I'm wrong! -- I think we do need more comic novelists and I think I see potential here.  A girl who can't say no?  You don't think that's funny?  I do.  Wait, didn't they write a song about that or something? ..

Life Itself by Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was a small town boy who made good in the big city. He's had a very interesting life, and that gives him plenty of material to write about.

I was very interested in the chapters on Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Ebert visited Cannes every year, for his job as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and has fun anecdotes to relate about that experience.

Possibly my favorite chapter is his chapter on Robert Mitchum. I'm sure this is partly because, like Ebert, I'm impressed by Mitchum. I'm impressed by Mitchum's charisma; Ebert is impressed by his lack of pretense. Ebert recounts a couple of visits to Mitchum on location, one in the Dingle Peninsula of County Kerry, in western Ireland, while Mitchum was filming Ryan's Daughter. Another visit was to a set in Pittsburgh; Ebert accompanied Mitchum on a drive to the set during which Mitchum's driver became badly lost. Not coping well with being either late or lost, I'm impressed by Mitchum's sang froid as he hums "76 Trombones" under his breath.

Ebert loves London, and reports that he visited London at least once a year (if not more often) for many years. His account of Jermyn Street, and especially 22 Eyrie Mansion, is funny and engaging. He has a newspaperman's eye for characters and the telling anecdote or detail.

This book is clearly a collection of blog posts. One of the reasons that Ebert is so prolific, I think, is that it is fairly easy for him to continue writing despite the lasting effects of his surgeries, and writing is something that he connects him to the outside world. I'm guessing that continuing to be connected with readers and new fans helps to sustain him. As this book shows, his life before illness was busy and full of work, relationships, travel and socializing.

He talks about going to an annual conference in Boulder, a conference he attended each year for many years. It sounds fun. He acknowledges at the end of this chapter that, as the conference is really a forum for people to talk to each other, he won't go again.

In many ways, this book is a summing up of a full life. It's mostly about the joy of knowing interesting people and telling fun stories about them. In fact, that is what the word "memoir" means to me: a collection of stories about people one has known. But he does reflect on what he's learned and his conclusion is that life is mostly about creating happiness for others and by doing so, for oneself. I think that's a sentiment that Gretchen Rubin would endorse.

One of my favorite bits of this book is when Ebert is working for Russ Meyer, writing the script of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, an X-rated film. Ebert and Meyer are working in a suite of offices:

"We fell into a routine. At nights we would dine like trenchermen, Russ insisting on large cuts of beef to keep my strength up. On yellow legal pads we made up the story day by day. I would write from ten to six. Russ kept all the office doors open. He equated writing with typing. When my typewriter fell silent, he would call, "What's wrong?" One day, at about page 122 of the screenplay, an inspiration struck. I entered Russ's office dramatically.

"I've got news for you," I said. "Z-Man is a woman. He's been a woman all along."

"I like it," Meyer said.

Before I close, I must share with you what Ebert shared with his readers: the secret of his speed as a writer is not that he writes more quickly than others but that he spends less time not writing than others. I think some of the writers I know would warmly endorse this bit of good advice; I know I always struggle over my beginnings and often cut them by two thirds or rewrite them entirely. A journalist he worked with on the Champaign News-Gazette told Ebert not to waste time working over his lead before he wrote the story: after all, he said, how do you know what the story's about until you get to the end? So write your story or your paper and then go back and rewrite the beginning to make it one that matches your ending.

Reading Now

I've read the Steve Jobs biography up to his founding of NEXT; I think I wanted to put it aside, a little bit, because on a certain level I felt a need to digest the notion of his having succeeded, and failed, and been fired from his own company, all by the age of 30.

As Isaacson points out, starting NEXT is just the second act of a great three act drama. He mentions that Arthur Rock, an investor and Apple board member, said that getting fired was the greatest thing that ever happened to Jobs. Isaacson goes on to say that that's not exactly true. Instead, he says, starting NEXT was the learning experience that helped Jobs the most: he had in NEXT, Isaacson writes, a kind of laboratory in which he could indulge all his whims and obsessions without restraint and when his ideas flopped, spectacularly, he had a chance to learn. I read the beginning of this chapter twice, and as I read it the second time, I realized that it echoed something Daniel Pink said in his Johnny Bunko book: dare to make spectacular mistakes. I find myself feeling that as readable as Isaacson's book is, it tells the story of very eventful years at a great clip and this is why, I think, I need to put it aside for a while so that I can digest it.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Ebert's book. He's a journalist, and writes in a straightforward style that is not as stylish, perhaps, or as passionate, or even as interesting, as that of some other memoirists I've read in the past twelve months. But he tells stories, and the stories he tells are interesting. I enjoyed reading his chapters on alcoholism, Robert Mitchum, Martin Scorsese, and Zonka (Zonka is no one you've ever heard of before - not a celebrity - and that's part of the charm of this tale: it's just a guy, telling a story about his friend, Zonka; it's like when you're at a bar and someone tells you a story so fine, or so surprising, that you're tempted to say, "You should write a book" but you don't, because you'd better have a pretty good reason to write a book).