. a number a number of our authors on board. lovely videos that we just aren't releasing yesterday. talking about why books are important and why they make time to read. they are also on the website and can be found on a social media channels. >> making time to read is important because. >> if you don't make time to read your brain will rot. >> a book can educate entertain, enlightened. >> there is nothing like a book to make you see the world in a knew way. >> some of the impact books of that on my life i would say this saved my life. >> i have never been without a book. >> a book does not require a password. >> re: when i should be looking at television.

>> it is hard to find time to read. >> i developed my love for reading as a boy. >> by the age of ten i was reading all kinds of crazy stuff. >> don quixote of ivanhoe. >> and trash, too. >> alice in wonderland. >> a faraway look comes into the child's eyes. his or her mouth drops open and you no that the child is lost in the story. ..

from noon to 4:00 p.m. in your timezone. a web site once again? >> penguin random house.com/read-a-thon or search national read-a-thon date is the first thing that comes up. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. recently shinned i get a man who escaped in 2000 by front north korea and prison camp after being born there admitted he did not accurately portray some parts part of his experiences when telling a story to blaine harden. journalist blaine harden appeared on c-span's q&a program in 2012 to discuss his book "escape from camp 14" based on his story.

this is about an hour. c-span: blaine harden your book is called "escape from camp 14" and in your first sentence in the preface is his first memory is an execution. what are you talking about? >> guest: the story is about a kid at this point in the story. he was born in camp 14. one of the political labor camps of north korea. his first memory at the age of four was going with his mom to a place near where he grew up in the camp to watch somebody get shot and shootings, public executions in the camp were held every few weeks. they were a way of punishing people who violated the camp rules and terrorizing the 20 to

40,000 people who lived in the camp to obey the rules from then on. c-span: you say in your book you have been in north korea once. did you get to see a camp? >> guest: nobody has been to a camp other than north korean guards officials and the people who go to them and almost never come out. there are now five or six of these camps and they contain between 150 and 200,000 prisoners and with the exception of one camp they are no exit places where one goes if you are believed or imagined by the north korean government of having done something wrong, as having been a wrongdoer or a wrong thinker. and you go there without trial. usually you are taken away at night and you stay there for the rest of your life and very often you go with your kids and with

your parents. i was at a conference yesterday on concentration camps and the latest information is half of the people in the camps now are believed to be just a relative of wrongdoers or wrong thinkers. so collective guilt is wearing much a part of the system. the reason the camps exist and have existed for more than 40 years is because they

on an island in pyongyang and taken to various places that they want to show off, statues, assembly halls, grand avenues,

the subway and then we were taken to the airplane and left two and a half days later. so my understanding of north korea based on that trip is bizarre and full of white concrete and very emasculate dressed guards but that's not the reality of north korea. the way you find out about the reality of north korea is increasingly easy for her purported to do it, it's to go to stohl south korea where there are now close to 30,000 defectors in south korea almost all of whom have arrived in the past 10 years. and you can talk to them and they are by far the best sources about what it's like to live in a country and how difficult it is to get out. there are now 60 former camp

inmates and former guards in total who have been interviewed by human rights groups who have given a very detailed nuanced and really credible picture of what goes on in the camp and that picture in their words has been supplemented by increasingly detailed satellite images of all the camps. c-span: 23 million in the north. how many in the south? >> guest: one and 50 million. and there are really two different places, two different universes. south korea is now the 11th largest economy in the world. it has people obsessed with education. they work really hard. they have less leisure than any other country in the developed world and they commit suicide at a very high rate in fact the highest rate in the world now.

it's a high-pressure, high achieving education obsessed culture. that really does not pay a lot of attention to north korea in the cultural sense or in the aspirational sense. he deals with north korea because it must because of the troublemaking neighbor. c-span: if my memory is correct we lost 50,000 americans in the korean war. back in the early 50's. what was that war about and what was south korea then compared to north korea? >> guest: well they were both poor and they were both recovering from the ravages of world war ii. and that war the united states divided the korean peninsula in the wake of world war ii between the north and the south and the south was sort of a military dictatorship aligned with united states and the north was a

military dictatorship aligned mostly with russia. kim il-sung was the leader who emerged in north korea and he over period of 10 years created a cult of personality around himself. he modeled his state after stalin state and then he invaded south korea in 1951. and made some real progress across south korea. there was a counterattack by u.s.-led forces and united nations forces that ran over the course of three years. they fought for a stalemate in the same line was returned in north and south korea have been deprived ever since. north korea remained allied with russia and with china but north korea developed a brand of

totalitarian leadership that became increasingly isolated and increasingly cruel as time went by. kim il-sung was a popular leader. he had a real grassroots support from lots of north koreans. and when he died in 1994 people genuinely wept. his son the first hereditary dictator in a communist state kim jong-il was less popular and he didn't have a popular touch. but he was shrewd and he was cruel and the camps as an instrument of enforcement became increasingly important. and the population grew. there are indications now with this third kim family leader kim jong m. who is 28, 29 years

old and interestingly it's about the same age as the hero in my book it's unclear how popular he will be or if he will have control at this point. c-span: we will come back to your hero the book shin after a show you some video from our first book interview back in 1991 i asked you if you like to travel. [video playing] i went to school and i got interested in faraway lands pretty remember as a kid in college i didn't believe they existed. i really didn't. sometimes i would go to bed thinking walter cronkite in those other people were putting together a big elaborate deception. they were photographing in the world outside of what i knew wasn't there. and i always wanted particularly

to see what was there. c-span: do remember saying that? >> guest: yes i do and i did think that and i sort of spent my life proving myself wrong, proving my college self wrong by traveling and being a foreign correspondent. c-span: when we talk to the "washington post" and you wrote a book about africa but since then where have you lived? >> guest: in eastern europe. i was there for the collapse of communism and the yugoslav wars which is a really interesting mix because one was a story full of joy and hope and reconciliation. the probably shouldn't wear and czechoslovakia people came out by the hundreds of thousands and listen to his incredible speeches and left the main square and didn't even step on

the flower beds. it was a wonderful joyous thing to do and to be a part of. and then the yugoslav crackup came and it was a horrible mess then americans didn't understand. it was incredibly dangerous. it won on for a long time. i did not see it all through. i left about two-thirds of the way through it and came home and wrote a book about another subject and felt terrible guilt. and actually some post-traumatic stress because i spent a lot of time in a lot of time is. the wind had taken a lot of risks. i didn't think i had done a good job in the bad guys were winning when i left. so it was a very strange assignment from joy to really heartbreak. c-span: in 1995 you were talking about a book on the columbia river. let's watch this clip. we were on the bus at the time.

[video playing] >> i was born there and i grew up there. c-span: had given back whately? >> guest: i spent part of 199394 if they are writing a book about the columbia river which is a big environmental problem out there. c-span: the death and the famine have been to a large extent wiped out and there's a huge public policy debate. what's interesting about the place is my family went there and i was born in the town that the water was diverted from the columbia river to irrigate farms around the town and my family and my ability to go to college depended on destroying the river. that is what the stories about. c-span: lake washington is where? >> guest: is in the columbia basin almost in the middle of washington state. it was a desert and a brand -- built grand cooley dan and diverted water from the columbia

river interin that desert into a very productive farm area. c-span: said he left eastern europe and came back here and then where did you go? >> guest: i went to "the new york times" for four years and i was a roving national correspondent and also i did stories about africa and eastern europe. i went back to the post which was the mother ship as all the editors call that end it really was the place that had hired me when i was young when i first came on your show. so i went back and then i covered the american west for the "washington post" from 2003 until 2007 and then they said do you want to go to asia and i said well i i don't know. my wife said yes you should go. so we went with our little daughter and son and we were there until 2010.

c-span: where did you live? >> guest: in tokyo. but when i went to japan my boss boss, the boss of the foreign correspondent at the post he said you are a feature writer. i want you to do something that is hard and something you probably don't want to do and i want you to write about north korea. i want you to bash her your head against that story until a something new. tell us how it works and if he failed that's fine but if you don't try and going to be very unhappy. so i started to work on that. c-span: this book has on the cover of picture this young man. who is a? >> guest: he was born in the camp and he escaped and as far as we know he is the only individual on earth born in those camps to get out and tell

what it's like to grow up in the camp. c-span: where did you get the idea to do a book about him? >> guest: i interviewed him in 2008 and wrote a story that was on the front page that really resulted in an incredible emotional reaction by the readers. they wanted to know more about him and about the camps. they wanted to give him money and save his soul so i went back a few weeks after that came out and i said let's do a book. let's dig into everything you know about that camp about how you got out of there and what it was like to walk across north korea and he didn't trust me and didn't want to do it. so i begged him for nine months and human rights groups who had become familiar with the story said you should cooperate because this will further your goals which is to make the world aware of these camps and also it

will maybe create some sort of governmental pressure in the united states so that human rights become at the top of the agenda when we deal with north korea. >> host: you made an arrangement about the money. >> guest: we split the money and that was important to him because he doesn't have any money. and he doesn't really have any business other than being a survivor of this camp and then we started to work on it. c-span: where did you get the idea that even have a story? >> guest: i knew he had a story because a friend of mine who has become a very close friend who is with the u.s. committee on human rights in north korea she met my wife at a book group and told her about this guy and then i talked to her and then i went to stohl and

had lunch with him. it's really interesting the language because i don't speak korean and he doesn't speak anything other than korean. we did interviews in seoul and in seattle and we also did hundreds of e-mails. c-span: i want to show picture view in front of the story in seoul. what were the circumstances? >> guest: this was during one of our weeks of interviews in seoul and 2009. c-span: how tall are you in how tall is he? >> guest: i am six-foot one inch and he is about 5 feet 6 inches. maybe 5 feet 5 inches. he is wanted for malnutrition and disarms her bowed from

childhood labor. most of the male population of north korea suffers from malnutrition. when males come to south korea and now they're about 30,000 of them they are on average now according to the south korean government more than 5 inches shorter than their south korean contemporaries. that's an amazing statement about the nutrition and south korea. c-span: where is the two-day? >> guest: today he's in washington because we are promoting the book but he had moved six or seven months ago from the united states back to seoul where he is doing web broadcasting with young human rights friends and he brought other defectors on to talk about north korea. c-span: so the translation was it expensive? >> guest: no it wasn't that expensive.

a lot of people cared about shin dong-hyuk and they cared about historian wanted to get it out. i had really good translators some of whom worked for the "washington post" in seoul but the most important translator was a young guy named david kim who is a friend of shin's and a family who fed shin in southern california when he was living in a suburb of los angeles. david kim offered to be a translator and he's a graduate of yale. he's now at northwestern law school and he is incredibly smart and he is really multilingual and idiomatic american english as well as he speaks korean. his parents don't speak much english and he's a good friend.

he developed the translating in southern california which where did the bulk of the reporting and when shin -- shin really opened up after year. c-span: wears his picture taken? >> guest: this is a group house in california where shin was living and working for a human rights group which helped bring shin to united states in 2009 and where he was an unpaid volunteer. they gave him housing in this group house and he lived there between 12 and 25 people within that house. mostly people younger than him. c-span: how old is he today? >> guest: he is 29. c-span: you have a lot of torture stories in this book. go to the one and this is out of context but so people can understand how far went with him, the story about him being put over a --

>> guest: when he was 13 years old he was taken to an underground prison and i will explain the context of this a little later but he was taken to an underground prison and asked about the escape of his mother and brother and he didn't have good answers. he was very afraid and very confused and so at one point in that underground prison he was taken to room that looked like a machine shop. he was stripped and hung upside down from his ankles and his wrist with his clothes off. and andy card was brought in with a coal fire and the flames bellows from the flames and flames came out. the cart was rolled underneath his body and he was burned as they asked him questions.

and he passed out. c-span: what were the extent of his injuries from not? >> guest: they are still visible. he has terrible burn marks on his lower back and the most severe burn you would get from being held over a fire. he had other marks on his body from other events and he has the middle finger of his right hand cut off at the first knuckle when he was 22 23. he was working in a military uniform factory inside the camp. he was fixing sewing machines and working with the groove seamstresses. he dropped a sewing machine and they got real mad because sewing machines are very valuable and would be more valuable than the human beings that fixed them. they took a table and hacked off part of his vigorous punishment.

almost immediately and he has scarring on his legs from where he was hung upside down in that prison as part of the torture to get them to talk about the escape of his mother and brother. and when he escaped the camp he called -- went to a high-voltage fence and his leg came in contact with the lowest brand and it burned his legs from his knees to his ankles on both legs. the scars are really horrible. c-span: when he escaped the camp and went to china and what year was that? >> guest: that was in 2005. c-span: how did he get inside of the camp and the first-place? >> guest: he was born there. his crime was to be born and his parents were there for reasons that are almost as flimsy.

his father was in the camp because his father's brothers after the korean war had fled south korea and after the authorities heard about that his father and his father's many brothers and parents were all rounded up and taken to camp for teen and that is where shin was born. he didn't know why his mother was there. she never told him and he never asked. they didn't have the kind of relationship where they would talk. his parents, his mom and dad conceived him because they were chosen by the guards for something called a reward marriage. and shin was bred like a farm animal in the camp and raised by this mother. he was physically his mother gave birth to him but he was raised with the values of the rules of the guards and was not

close to his mother at all. he had to memorize rules of the camp most of which ends by saying if you don't do this you will be shot immediately in the first rule of the camp the most important rule is if you try to escape yuli shot immediately. the corollary to that rule is if you hear about an escape and don't report it you will be shot immediately. these were basically his 10 commandments come is ethical guideposts growing up in that camp. c-span: let me read the rest of those 10 quickly so people can understand what the rules of the camp were. almost all be shot immediately if they are caught. the first one would not try to escape in the second no more than two persons can meet together. the third one do not steal. guards must be obeyed unconditionally and five anyone

who sees a suspicious figure must must properly reporting. six, prisoners much watch one another in report suspicion immediately. seven, prisoners must more than fulfill the work assignment each day. eight there must be no intermingling for personal reasons. nine prisoners must generally repent of their errors and 10 prisoners who violate the laws in relation to the camp will be shot immediately. were they really shot immediately? >> guest: they were shot often and shin was one of the only forms of entertainment in the camp where people get together to watch something like an execution. and so the rules were taken very seriously particularly by the kids who saw the results of disobedience very clearly. c-span: what was the first

execution that shin saw? >> guest: it was the one that begins the book when he was four years old. c-span: how does he remember anything from being for? >> guest: i said what is your first memory and he said i remember going with the crowd of people and my mom and being very excited because it was the first time he had ever been around the crowd before. the rules of the camp is that you don't spend time with a lot of people so that's what i think triggers his memory is that he had never been in a crowd of people. he had never heard this how about of people whispering and being close together in a big crowd of many thousands of prisoners. c-span: what's the business about putting marbles in their mouths when they are shot? >> guest: that is a very common practice. i have talked to three others who saw this happen and they do it so that people don't denounce the guards were particularly the

leadership of the country. they can't say anything. its rocks actually. c-span: rocks and they put a lid over them. >> guest: sometimes they put a amendment hood on and sometimes they don't. c-span: what about his parents? what did he see with the death of his parents and his brother? >> guest: the real heart of this book and the psychological trauma of the rest of his life comes out of the escape plan of his mother and brother. what happened is when he was 13 he was living in a boarding school which was all kids leave their parents had 12 and go to live with other kids in a boarding school. c-span: in the camp? >> guest: in the camp and this was a couple of blocks from where his mom is staying. shin had been at a boarding school for a a while and am a

friday night his teacher a guard, guy who worked and told him go home and stay with your mom tonight and in combat. shin didn't particularly want to because he didn't particularly like his mom but he did because he was told to. he went home and when he went home that night his brother was also at the house. this was unusual because his brother also looked away from home. t. lived in a concrete factory which was a mile and a half. the campus did. c-span: his brother was eight years older than he was. >> guest: he was eight years old and he had no relationship with him. they have the supper that he had eaten, the only mail. even in his life which was salt corn and cabbage. that i was breakfast lunch and dinner. they put salt in soup cabbage soup and corn. it's kind of a gruel and that's

the primary things other than small animals that they could catch in the camps like mice and rats. but this meal was that classic meal. he had the meal. he went to sleep in the house they lived in had a central kitchen in one bedroom and the central kitchen was for three other units besides the room where his mother slept. he went into the bedroom and fell asleep and he was awakened by a conversation of his mother and brother about midnight and he heard them talking and he looked out and he also saw that his mother was cooking rice for his brother. rice is something that hardly exists at all in the camp and is grown there so some people some farmworkers can steal it in his mom worked on the farm in the camp. she must have stolen some over time and is making rice. she had never made rice for him. he was really jealous.

he was 13 years old. he was really jealous about that and that piqued his interest and then he heard them talking and his father and brother was in some kind of trouble in the camp. he apparently violated a rule and left the concrete factory without permission and had gone to his mother. the guard would soon come for him and take him away and punish him. probably not execute him but beat him up was the common way of punishing people. so she -- and then he heard his brother mentioned the word escape. shin's heart started to pound and he upset and very afraid because of these rules. if you don't report them escape you will be executed. then he heard his mother countenancing that conversation about escape. shin listen for a while and he

was it was clear that they were talking about trying to escape and the rise she was cooking was food for flight for him to take and t after he got out of the camp. shin got up and told his mom yet to go to the bathroom and went out and found a guard and reported them. nt to a classmate and said what should i do in the classmate said we should report them so they went together. when he reported them he was thinking how can i turn this to my advantage so he we asked the guard if he could have more food as a result of the snitching and if he could be made class later a position that would allow him to do less work and take fewer beatings and maybe have more food well. the guard said sure, no problem. the guard called his superiors and told shin to go to bed. shin went to bed in the school where he lives.

the next morning he was awakened and told that they were guards waiting for him and they put a blindfold on him outside of the school, put them in a jeep and drove them off to this underground camp which he before that did not know existed and he was taken inside and that he was interrogated. he went thinking they would see him as a good snitch so they started asking them questions about his involvement in the escape and he was frightened and confused. he did not answer in eniko apparently for his first two rounds of interrogation which included that torture that i told you about. in the third interrogation when he was two weeks he'd been burned so badly. he was lying on the floor in his cell and he told them i did a good job. i turn that my mother.

you can check this out with my classmates and they did check it out and shin was allowed to recover and that underground prison and that he was taken out after seven months. he was taken to the same officers who had originally interrogated him and came out and he saw his father was in the camp. his father had also been tortured and looked horrible. his father's leg had been broken in the torture and his father could hardly move, hardly walk. then they were both taken together in a jeep with blindfold son back to the execution ground the place that he first remembers from and was for, if the crowd. shin had his blindfold taken off and he said they are going to kill me now. he was terrified that he was about to be shot but they took his father and helped his father

up to the front of the room and they held shin up to the front of the row and they drag out his mom and his brother. what's really interesting about this is that when his mom came out she was put on a makeshift gallows right in front of him and she was not blindfolded. the hood was not put over her face. she tried to catch her son's eyes and he hated her. for the horrors he had gone through this underground prison and for her reckless talk of escape. he refused to catch her eye and she was hanged in front of him and then his brother were shot in the head three times by the guards. and then shin went back into the cap population as a 14-year-old. c-span: what happened to his father? >> guest: his father lost his good job as a lathe operator.

he began to work as a common laborer around the camp and shin had a strained relationship after this execution. his father tried to say i'm sorry and we were so selfish as to have children in this camp and i'm sorry you had to live through this and i hope somehow you can get out of here and shin said i don't care what you say. c-span: is he alive? >> guest: shin escaped a decade later. c-span: the year that he escaped was? 2005. how did he escape? >> guest: he escaped -- the escape is a very important part of the book. one thing i want to say about the experience of the execution is that shin was raised in such a way that he didn't really love his mother. he did not have feelings of

affection, trust toward his father or his brother and i first asked him how could you hate your mother? how could you not look her in the eye when she died and he said you know these people were competitors with me for food. they did nothing for me that was useful. c-span: what about god? >> guest: he had never heard about god. it was a concept he heard up when he got into south korea but learning how to trust other people and learning to feel guilty for what he did to his mother is something that he has had to do with since he got to south korean united states. united states. using other families and seen other mothers and sons together and he has begun to feel terribly guilty about the kind of boy he was and what he did. but then he wasn't guilty.

c-span: i don't want to leave it but does he know what happened to his father? >> guest: no. he assumes that his father was either tortured or killed as result a result of his escape. c-span: now i noticed this as a book that people should read i'm sure from your perspective and i don't want it don't want to every detail but escaping to china was difficult for him in what way? >> guest: well. c-span: you said it had never happened before. >> guest: that would give you an indication that this existed according to south korean authorities since 1968 and nobody has known to have escaped until shin 2005 so it's really hard to get out of there and he did it because he met someone who inspired him to think of the outside world.

i think this is sort of shin's birth as a human being. he was in the camp working in the sewing machine factory when he was assigned to work with an older guy i think it is early 40s. his name is park and parkhead lived in pyongyang. he had traveled and been educated in the former soviet union. he was a worldly and nice guy. shin's jobless to snitch on them because shin a proven himself as a snitch over the years because he had done with his parents and with many other people but shin started talking to park about the world and parks that i grew up in pyongyang and shin was interested in hearing a story. and then shin started talking about something -- park started talking about something that shin was interested in which was food. park like to eat and he talked about the joys and wonders of grilled meat in china.

you could get grilled chicken and grilled beef and grilled pork and you could eat until you're full and you didn't have to be rich or important. that's the way people live outside of the cam. i that was the revelation that shin could not get out of his imagination. he dreamed about it and fantasized about eating well. park toga many other things that were news to him that the world is round that china existed and south korea existed, that the united states existed, that the leaders in north korea were a bunch of thieves and thugs. but none of that was very interesting to shin because he had no context for understanding that. his context was that he had been hungry his whole life and he learned that if he could just get out of this cage he could eat. he said that was enough for him.

c-span: cam 14 is how far from the chinese border? >> guest: is about 300 miles and it's about 50 miles just north of pyongyang in the mountains of central north korea. c-span: what was the camp surrounded with? what kind of sounds? >> guest: is a barbed wire fence between eight and 10 barbed wire lines electric and this was not the kind of fans were a cow touches it and jumps. it's the kind of sense that if you touch it will grab you and it will kill you. that's the kind of fence it is. shin got very excited and he said to park lets escape. let's try to escape and park was okay with that idea. he said they would try and he met park just two months before he decided to escape. this is all very sudden and shin

got very they were really lucky in their escape landing because it was the first of the year to go up to the side of the camp to gather firewood that was close to the fence that wasn't near the guard towers were the guards looked out on the prisoners with weapons when they could have shot people at the fence. they waited until late afternoon on january 2, 2005. at dusk, the glowing light and they ran toward the fence. in fact when they decided to go when shin decided to go he said let's go to park and park said i'm not so sure. shin grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the fence and park started to run. as they ran shin slipped and fell and the snow on an icy part of the snow because it was cold in the middle of the winter.

park shoved his torso between the first and second strands of wire and was electrocuted and fell dead on the fence and pulled the bottom strand down. shin called without a moments hesitation crawled over his body and got most of the way across that fence and his legs slipped off on both sides and he got terrible burns from a voltage. i talked to an expert on electrocution at the university of washington who deals with people who deal with power lines with all the power lines around the hydro dams in the pacific northwest. the scenario which struck me as pretty weird and pretty odd and very believable he said is completely believable that this would happen and this would be the only way. he needed that insulator of the human body grounding the voltage to the ground so he could get through that fence without

taking a lethal charge. c-span: the chance that he would have been electrocuted himself. >> guest: he was lucky to get the defense but it's not like winning the lottery. if something bad is conceivable to do according to experts. he got through the fence. the plan was for shin to be inside and he was the one who helped them get to the fence and away they wouldn't get shot as they approach the fence but once they got to the fence mr. park who had been outside the fence who corrupt out there in the real world he was supposed to take them to china. he had an uncle they are and arrange for their shipment to south korea. the park was dead. c-span: i won't go into detail because there's plenty to read about that tactic out of prison how long did it take him to get to china and then back to south korea? >> guest: took them a month to get across to south korea, a

month of walking, riding in trucks. he hopped a train and one of the things that's really interesting about his journey across north korea of totalitarian police state, and this is a kid who didn't know which way was north and it really is an incredibly lucky trip that he made but shin had a couple of things toward his advantage. he was very smart smart and have this calming sense of self survival. that is why he managed to survive in a camp and he also was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. he didn't didn't tell anybody that he was from a camp. a few hours after he got to the fence he came to an old barn that nobody was around and he found military clothing which he put on. this was in north korea just outside the camp. north korea is the most militarized society on earth a million man army. c-span: out of 23 million

people. >> guest: their military uniforms and almost every bar that you'd find so he found a military uniform and a change of clothing so he was no longer dressed like a camp inmate in distinctive clothing. he then walked into town and he looked very much like a lot of young north koreans. he was skinny. he was wearing an old military uniform and he didn't have much to do. there were a lot of unemployed people that lived in north korea in the wake of the great famine in 1991 almost a million people died. north korea at the lowest level was a very disorganized place where the crew distribution service depended on smugglers from china and farmers selling food from cooperative farms when they were not supposed to and the government had no choice but

to put out this messy informal market system because it's the only way that people can eat. there are estimates that 80 to 90% of the calories in the stomach of any north korean come from the system now. so shin fell into the system. he was lucky. within a few days he had broken into a house stolen s'more clothing, warmer clothing and stolen a big bag of rice. i think it was a 10-pound bag of rice which he put in a backpack in which he also stole and he walked past a market and the market lady said what if he got in the bag boy? he said i've got some cheese that i will give you money for it. he was given some wine. it was his first transaction with money and park told me a few weeks before that money and existed. he bought crackers and a few other snacks and went walking

out of town and saw some other traders who were moving north toward china to do more trading. he fell in with them and that was his route out of china. c-span: let's go back to how you put all this together. how many hours did you talk to shin to get this book? >> guest: i'm not sure how many hours but i think we had seven sessions of interviews and four of those sessions were weeklong sessions where we would start in the morning until late afternoon. c-span: how did you document it? >> guest: document the interviews? c-span: did you record them on audio all my? >> guest: on audio only and i also took notes on the computer simultaneously. there's a question of verifying his story and it's a very

important one to deal with i think. c-span: you say and here he lied to me about his role in his betraying his mother. he simply said they were executed and he saw been the reason he didn't was because when he got to south korea he thought it be told that story the south korean government might arrest him and certainly other people would think of him as not human and those were his words. so he decided he would sort of extricate his story a little bit. he finally about a year into her interview decided that he would tell me that sure is. he said the reason he didn't was because he was surrounded by people who were telling him the truth and who cared about him and he felt an odd addition to tell the truth. c-span: when you see this photo of him taken i believe in seattle what the zmapp face? >> guest: well, what's

interesting about his face is that he looks so young given the hardships of his life. he has aged a little bit. c-span: his age now? >> guest: this was taken when he was 28427 but when i met him a couple of years before that i thought it looked like he was a teenager. i saw him yesterday and he has a youthful look. c-span: how is he changed since you have started talking about him? >> guest: he has become less wary and less suspicious than a little bit more at peace with himself because he told the truth about the betrayal of his mother. yesterday we were talking at the human rights convention and he talked about selling out his mother and why he did it and what he hoped would become of the truth that he told. he wants people to know that

this is the kind of human being that they are trying to raise in these camps. there's a human rights abuse of starving people and shooting people but there's also that of raising children to be little monsters. c-span: did he ever get mad at you? >> guest: he got mad at me because he didn't want to talk about this stuff. i say in a book that it was like being a dentist and not using anesthetic. it was painful and miserable for him and sometimes he would just say no and leave. c-span: why do you think the american people would be interested in this book when you say in the book the south koreans could care less. >> guest: the reason people would be interested in this book is because it's a great story. it's an adventure story. it's also a psychological story because it's about how a person goes from having no human

emotions to figuring out that there good ideas and developing it. it's all sort of, the normal trajectory of escape stories were concentration camp stories that you have someone who comes from a sophisticated civilized family. they are taken to the camp. all their other relatives are killed. they have to behave in an inhuman way to survive and they come out and they tell their story about their dissent and to hell and in survival. shin's stories completely different because he was born in hell and thought it was home. and thought the valleys that he learned there were what it was to be human being and has now discovered that the world and what it means to be a human being are completely different. c-span: why did the south koreans not care about the north

koreans? >> guest: well because they have moved on as a culture and a some economy. their aspirations are for greater individual wealth for technological achievement. north korea which exists in some ways in the middle ages is a dead weight on those goals. most of the family time between north and south korea have been attenuated by time and weakened by age. most of the people who have were living relatives are in their 60s, 70's and 80s. so the actual connections are falling apart. c-span: i ran into some germans give a day and i said it going in your country and they said -- we read how well you are doing. top of the eastern germans and then you realize how much it cost the west germans.

are they worried in south korea? >> guest: they are very worried. there've been lots of studies by economic consulting groups about the cost of it and there are estimates that it could cost three times as much in comparable dollars because of the development problems in north korea. if you fly over the korean peninsula north korea is light and easy japan onto the right in-flight. it's dark in north korea and that darkness is a good symbol of the state of their development. there are very few roads. education system has largely collapsed. their factories don't work. the place is a basket case run

by a militarized state that survives because of aid from china and because of the sale of missiles to places like iran. c-span: we are going to run out of time but i want to get this done. you live where now? >> guest: i go back to seattle. c-span: how old are your kids? >> guest: my kids are seven and 10. c-span: where did you meet your wife? >> guest: i met her on a flight. i took a buyout from the post and i have been working since doing this book i've been working for the economist occasionally and occasionally for frontline cbs. c-span: a kind of thing could be done for frontline? >> guest: i worked on a program about a compromise in alaska. c-span: the oven of the book in my? >> guest: i do? c-span: what is it about? >> guest: that might be about alaska or my father's generation and i'm not sure.

c-span: what do you expect shin to do? and what i mean by that willie and up and south korea permanently or come back to united states and we haven't mentioned the couple from ohio. >> guest: the couple from ohio has been very important to shin. he calls them his parents and they are happy with that. they read my piece in the "washington post" and the help bring into the united states and they have given him counseling advice and love and security. ..

>> and. >> and he is thrilled with this book is selling in the united states and people are learning about the camps. that was the goal and the reason he went through the misery to talk