A review by val_halla
The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea by Jim Frederick, Charles Robert Jenkins

5.0

I was very impressed by how insightful and succinct this memoir was. At first, I was disappointed that it was so short, because it didn't seem like someone could describe 40 years under an oppressive regime in so few pages. But Charles Jenkins doesn't seem to see himself as an exceptional person, just a dumb kid who made a mistake that affected the rest of his life. His perspective is crucial to understanding the situation in North Korea, since he is one of the few outsiders to survive to tell it.