Summary Shin Dong-Hyuk was born a prisoner in Camp 14, a long-standing North Korean labor camp. The author, a writer who arranged a series of interviews with Shin to reveal his life story and his incredible status as the only person born in a North Korean labor camp to escape. He grew up learning to snitch on his friends and family would get him food in an environment where almost everyone was always starving. His parents were chosen for their “good conduct” in the field to marry and have children; they could only see each other five days a year. Common camp activities included: executions for those who attempted to escape, beatings for anyone caught stealing food or misbehaving, and the disappearance of prisoners if they tried to speak out against the camp leaders. Shin quickly learned to keep his head down, food being his only motivation, if he wanted to survive this hell. Shin's education was a rigorous program of basic mathematics, North Korean-approved limited history, and learning to read and write. Every morning he and his class had to recite the Ten Commandments of the labor camp; the first rule was that attempting to escape the camp would result in execution. The camp taught its prisoners that they were useless, nothing, disposable; those born within the camp have never known anything of mercy, kindness, forgiveness or companionship. Prisoners were not allowed to be in a group of two or more without the guards' permission, so there was little chance of making friends and finding courage in each other. Therefore, Shin could only rely on himself to avoid being beaten and to obtain the food necessary to survive. One day, Shin had a day off from school to visit his mother and older brother in his mother... middle of paper ......and immorality. This book achieved its goal of opening the reader's eyes to the kind of horrors that happen just two hundred or thousands of miles away from us; these human beings are alive and are being tortured while we sleep in our warm beds and eat abundant food in our enormous homes. A guard once told Shin that the reason prisoners are kept to starve is because "through starvation you will repent" as if he had done something wrong. This type of thinking is wrong and only through human rights education can these acts of horror be eradicated. Works Cited Cooper, Anderson. "60 Minutes: A Face in the Crowd, Three Generations of Punishment, Michael Jackson." 60 minutes. CBS. United States, May 19, 2013. Television.Harden, Blaine. Escape from Camp 14: One man's extraordinary odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West. New York: Viking, 2012. Print.