Just finished reading Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. In this short, simply written book, Kang Chol-Hwan tells how his grandparents, like other Korean immigrants in the 1970s, were lured from Japan back to North Korea to help build a workers’ paradise. What a horrifying sham it turned out to be. One day his grandfather disappears. And a short while later, Kang (then age 8) and his family are dispatched to a labor camp, where they toil all day and subsist on tiny rations of corn and the occasional salamander or grilled rat. Like the works of Weisel and Solzhenitsyn, this book is a harrowing and gripping saga that everyone should read.