Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad

Kirkpatrick (former editorial page deputy editor, Wall Street Journal) extensively interviewed North Koreans who left their families and risked forbidden travel in order to escape the world's last Stalinist dictatorship. Although the comparison is sometimes strained, Kirkpatrick quotes pre-Civil War American slave letters and abolitionist speeches to equate them with present-day brave North Koreans. The Korean "underground railway" runs from North Korea through North China, and many of the "conductors" are Chinese or Korean Christians. Some of the escapees died on the way, some made their way to freedom, and some were taken into virtual slavery as prostitutes or sold as wives. Though she does supplement the interviews with other sources, Kirkpatrick offers little historical background, nor is the story, as the title claims, "untold," as it has been related, though in less detail, in, for instance, Barbara Demick's Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009).