A Merry Christmas Non-Fiction Shopping List

The Non-Fiction Shopping List 2012

It's the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and it's time to start checking peoples' Amazon wish lists and listen for hints. Book readers can be a squirrley bunch, though, and none more so than those who read non-fiction. Some people read non-fiction simply for the desire to learn about the world around them, while others look down at fiction readers as escapists. Whatever the reason, there's plenty of good true stories out there to be given. Here's a few, along with the suggest audience for each.

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

North Korea's been all over the news this year, with last winter's death of Kim Jong-Il, the rise of Kim Jong-Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju, and the loosening of some of the restrictions there. This is a rather unique look into the most cloistered country in the world, through the eyes of an American POW.

Recommended for: the current-affairs and news junkies on your list.

A Man With No Talents

This is a rare look into one of the less shiny subcultures in Japan. Writing with the pen name Oyama Shiro, this chronicles the life of a day laborer through the bubble years and following recession in Japan. Unable to fit into the salaryman role laid out for him, the narrator take the more difficult, yet ultimately more freeing life of manual labor. Living in a bunk in a boardinghouse, not only does he blame no one for his fall in status, he thanks his society for giving him the opportunity to live as he wishes, with no responsibilities to anyone but himself.

Recommended for: people struggling with the current American recession, those who believe Japan has no underside.

The Boy who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba lived through some of the hardest times in Malawi. With his father unable to bring in a harvest, he couldn't afford to go to school. Even when he was young, though, he thought it was a shame that work and study had to end when it got dark. While trying to piece together an advanced science book in the village's library, he put together the bicycle lights he's seen around town and a picture of a windmill, and he brings a light in the darkness to his home for the first time.

Recommended for: with a strong message of self-reliance and a happy ending, this is a safe book for anyone from upper-middle-school to a grandmother.

Okimono Kimono

Almost more of an art book than a real story, one of the women of the CLAMP manga writing group puts together a beautiful collection of both original and traditional kimono. She relates her experiences in wearing kimono in regular life, as well as ways to modernize the style of dress while keeping them feminine and pretty.

Recommended for: most female manga readers would appreciate the art of this book, even if they'd never dress like this themselves.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Known by many aliases since her death, this is the story of the life and family of a poor black woman in Maryland. Treated at Johns Hopkins, the cancerous cells that eventually killed her opened the door to the study of human cells outside of the body. What follows is the history of her family, who never saw a dime of the money that their mother's cells made, the scientists who used her biological material without her consent, and a fascinating look at the fields of bioethics and medical patents.

Recommended for: fans of science, civil rights and biographies alike.

Good Women of China

China has one of the most controlled 'free' presses in the world. And yet, it's still much more relaxed than in decades past. In the 1980s, as radio was slowly able to show the country a more realistic view of itself, Xinran began a late-night call in show for women. Collected here are some of the most memorable stories from those years. Told in plain language, but with a journalist's ear for narrative, the lives of the women in this book will stay with the reader long after she closes the cover.

Recommended for: current events and history buffs, women's rights and civil rights activists, and anyone looking for poignant stories with a thread of hope woven within them.

So there it is. That should cover most of your shopping list. But again, as always, make sure to tuck that gift receipt into the front cover. Book readers are a wily bunch, and sometimes we read even the most obscure title without anyone knowing. 

A horrific look into North Korea, through the eyes of a man who lived the worst of it.

South Korea, like Japan, has had a renaissance in the last century or so. With a national attitude of always striving to achieve, the small nation has international auto companies, a huge online presence, and is now beginning to export its music and culture as well.

Just to the north is a country that, during the same period of time, has travelled backwards by decades. Unable to feed itself with its rocky soil and outdating farming practices, the same ethinc population is nearly three inches shorter than its well-fed southern counterparts.

But even in this strange world, there is a deeper hell to fall into. Their prison camps, scattered across the countryside, are a nightmare within a nightmare. These are the places that are used to control a population that watched as much as 10% of its population starve to death in the 1990s.

This is the hell that is Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden. In the worst of North Korea's prison camps, the people living there aren't being rehabilitated by labor. People sent to these are never expected to leave again. They're completely self-sufficient, with the prisoners even growing the food for the guards who live on-base. There's plenty of labor to go around, and even schools for the children.

At least the adults who are sent here have memories of their lives before they got here to hold on to. They remember a life outside of breaking rocks in the quarry, outside of less-than-subsistence farming, of the freedom to choose one's partner, rather than being assigned a mate for good behavior.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born here. For the first 14 years of his life, he had no idea about the world outside the fences of his camp. Unbelievably, the children of Camp 14 aren't even indoctrinated into the personality cult of Kim Il-Sung and his descendants. Where the Dear Leader's portrait hangs in virtually every classroom and public space in the country, the rules of the camp are posted. 

Violation of Rule Three, Subsection 2 - Anyone who steals or hides any kind of food in the work camp will be shot immediately - was the cause of his six year old classmate being beaten to death in front of the class. In this twisted mockery of society, ideals of filial piety and the value of children are mostly unheard of. Starving children steal food from their equally starving parents and are beaten for it. They're taught that they are here because of the sins of their parents, and that the way to redeem themselves is to accept the guards as their teachers. And as Shin learned early on, any infraction against these rules could, and did, result in a swift and painful death.

Escape never really occurred to Shin. He had no real idea that life would be different anywhere else. But when he was imprisoned and tortured following the failed escape attempt of his mother and brother, his outlook changed. He was placed in a cell with a man who had lived outside of North Korea for a time. It wasn't the brutality of his captors that made him dream of freedom. It wasn't watching his mother and brother be hanged, or a teen's curiosity at the larger world outside.

It was the stories of the banquets that the Chinese throw for any reason they can come up with. It was the dream of white rice and roast pork, from a child who had grown up on a thin gruel, with the occasional bit of Chinese cabbage and salt thrown in. It was the dream of eating until he was full that motivated Shin to be not only the first person to escape Camp 14, but the first person born in a labor camp to escape North Korea, and eventually make it all the way to the West.

This is no Elie Wiesel's Night. There is no holding on to their humanity for the children born here, because they were never taught to have any in the first place. There's no message of the strength of human spirit or any other platitudes like that. This is simply one man's story of growing up in hell, and escaping to a world he's never learned how to function in.

Highs: If nothing else, the reader learns to believe in blind luck, because after Shin manages to escape the prison camp itself, a string of much-needed good luck helps him along until he makes it to the South Korean embassy.

Lows: This is possibly the most unrelentingly brutal, despairing book I've ever come across.

Verdict: Perhaps the best accounting of a North Korean prison camp, but plan to follow reading this with something more uplifting.

Further Reading: Nothing to Envy, The Reluctant Communist

A bad decision gets a young man lost to North Korea for most of his life

There are some decisions that set the course of your life forever.  Picking a major in college.  Getting married.  Quitting a job to follow your dream.



Then there are the less well thought out life changers.  Dropping out of college to gold mine in World of Warcraft.  That one-night stand.  A drunk-dial to your (now former) boss.

Charles Robert Jenkins' poorly thought out decision probably trumps all of those.  Stationed in South Korea during the end of the US' involvement with the Korean war, Jenkins hears that his unit might soon be transferred to the war now heating up in Vietnam.


Jenkins has always been the type to take the easy way out.  In fact, he enlisted in the army because his father told him that he either had to get a job or join the military, and the military seemed easier.


Not liking the stories that he was hearing coming out of Vietnam, he comes up with a plan to get out of being transferred.  He's heard that men who have defected to the USSR regularly get sent home in prisoner exchanges.  He might spend a few years in Leavenworth, but that would be easier than the hell going on in Vietnam.  So, one particularly drunken night, he walks across the DMZ and turns himself in.


Unfortunately, North Korea is a completely different animal that the USSR.  Instead of seeing Jenkins' capture as a chance to get back some of their own men, they saw a golden opportunity to get information and train their spy program.  So there Jenkins stayed.


For four decades.


So Jenkins hardly got the easy out he was hoping for.  Although, in the world that is North Korea, he probably had it easier than many others.  He never quite starved to death, for one.  While the beatings were at times plentiful, from both the North Koreans as well as other American prisoners, he always recovered from them.  He even found something of a love match with a prisoner kidnapped from Japan to work with the spy program as well.  All in all, it could have turned out much worse for him.


Along the way, we get to see some of the truly bizarre customs and beliefs that are programmed into the lives of everyday North Koreans.  The government does such a complete job of blacking out the media that the average citizen simply has no idea how different the world outside is.  And those who do know what happens to them and their families if they show the slightest signs of dissent.


Even as you shake your head at the sheer idiocy of defecting to North Korea, to which Jenkins fully admits, there are moments to cheer for him as the underdog of the story.  When he's assigned to teach English classes to future spies, he purposefully gives them the wrong words, out of a combination of amusement and spite.  You can't help but cringe along with him when he's assigned a 'housekeeper' who lays down the law about how the house is going to be run.  And you cheer at the end when he gets to teach his daughters about how the rest of the world lives.


The writing's simple, and it's a very quick read.  It gives a unique and intriguing look into one of the most insular countries in the world, which would be hard to get anywhere else.


Highs:  The writing's brutally honest in its self-reflection, which keeps the story from turning into a "look how hard my life is" mess


Lows:  Parts of the narrative could have been cleaned up better by the editor of co-writer


Verdict:  Material you won't get anywhere else, and short enough not to be boring


Further Reading:  North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter, Pyongyang

A mother's loss becomes an international incident

Over here in the US, we’re very luck that we border fairly reasonable countries.  We had some issues with Cuba a generation ago, and Mexico might be having some problems, but generally we’re not doing to badly with our next-door neighbors.

Japan, on the other hand, isn’t quite so lucky.  Just to the northwest is one of the most insular and unstable countries in the world.  A country with a history of dictator-for-life leaders even though the country is nominally communist.  A country where the leaders have ludicrous riches while the citizens not only cannot support themselves, but are starving while donated food rots in storage.

That country would be North Korea.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least 13 Japanese were abducted, mostly from coastal towns, with the intent of using them to train Korean spies to pass as Japanese citizens.  Although the rest were adults, Megumi Yokota was only 13 years old when she was kidnapped on her way home from school.  The police found a few of her belongings, but there is no other sign of what happened to her.

What follows in Sakie Yokota’s North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter is a decades-long quest by her parents to discover what happened to their beloved daughter.  It took North Korea until 2002 to officially admit that they had abducted Japanese citizens for their training camps.  Until then, the local police made the painful suggestions that perhaps Megumi had killed herself or simply run away.  Her parents, especially her mother, could no accept any of these theories, and never gave up their fight for justice.

As a piece of literature, however, it leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Revelations are few and far between, which is how life is.  Because of the long stretches without any new information, the book tends to drag on and seem rather dry, as the mother can only tell us about the lengths that she’s gone to find her daughter without any success.

The book also isn’t focused on the international aspect of the conflict.  There’s still a book out there to be written that focuses on all the people abducted by North Korea.  Citizens from South Korea, Japan, and even Russian and Europe have all disappeared.  This book is solely focused on the one family.

I also hesitate to criticize her directly on the quality of the writing.  Vertical is a fairly small publishing company, and is not used to publishing novels or nonfiction.  It could easily be the fault of the translator that the writing comes across as so stilted and formal to American ears.  It could also be the writing style of the people of Sakie Yokota’s generation.  In general, Japanese speech among adults is more formal than in the US, so that might be how their writing is as well.  An especially good translator would have changed the cadence of the writing to what the region’s readers are accustomed to, but that might not have been done here.

All around, the information is interesting and not found anywhere else in the US.  While the writing is a bit reminiscent of a Dateline NBC episode, it’s an in-depth look at how mothers in other countries cope with some of the hardest events in life.

Highs:  The government finally starting to pursue the case as a kidnapping

Lows:  Dealing with local police

Verdict:  Worth reading for the information, though not necessarily for pleasure reading

Further Reading:  The Reluctant Communist, Pyongyang