Kirkus Review
A riveting account of what happened to a U.S. sergeant after he walked across the DMZ and defected to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1965. With the assistance of Frederick, Time magazine's former Tokyo bureau chief, Jenkins describes himself on the day he abandoned the men under his command as a young, scared, slightly drunk 24-year-old who basically wanted to go AWOL and get out of the army. He sobered up during a 40-year Sartrean odyssey in the most Orwellian of nations. Jenkins provides a rare look inside a country where up is down and down is up, where citizens are regularly forced to proclaim their loyalty to the "Dear Leader," where food, heat and logic are hard to come by. He managed to make a go of it, gamely keeping the "Organization" (his word for the Communist Party) at bay and scrounging together a living in a dirt-poor nation. In 1980 he met and quickly married Hitomi Soga, a young Japanese woman kidnapped by the North Korean security services as part of a program to indoctrinate future spies. In 2002, when North Korea was attempting rapprochement with Japan, Hitomi was allowed to visit her homeland; she stayed and ultimately arranged for Jenkins and their two daughters to join her in 2004. He surrendered to U.S. military authorities and received a 30-day sentence and dishonorable discharge for desertion and aiding the enemy. This slender book is short on historical context, although Frederick's long introduction does a decent job of setting up the story and giving some frame to Jenkins's life. The journalist's description of Jenkins's traumatized mental state during their first interview on a U.S. base in Tokyo in 2004 (mere hours after he got out of the brig) casts some doubt over this tale, but it's still well worth reading. Short on history and ideas, but worth it for the rare view inside the North Korean moonscape. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1965, Jenkins, a sergeant in the U.S. Army stationed in Korea, walked across the DMZ and surrendered to North Korean troops. He hoped to be swapped in a prisoner exchange, thereby returning sooner than otherwise to the United States; he was held in North Korea until 2004. During those years, he taught English to military officers, translated Western press and Hollywood film soundtracks, and even acted in domestic film productions. He usually lived with or near other U.S. military defectors and foreigners who said they had been abducted from abroad. Although these foreigners lived better than North Korean citizens, they resorted to growing their own food to have enough to eat, digging their own wells, and maintaining their own electrical generators, especially during the 1990s, when the economy declined sharply. They were required to attend study groups on the thought of Kim Il Sung and to be mindful of the ever-present controllers who watch foreigners and citizens alike. Jenkins's straightforward presentation, written with the assistance of Frederick (senior editor, Time magazine), conveys effectively both the hardships that he and other foreigners endured and the understanding and personal ties that he established. Readers have few opportunities to hear firsthand about life inside North Korea; those who follow current events will be intrigued by this story. [The book was written in English but first appeared in Japanese translation overseas.-Ed.]-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
