Arcadia Public Library

"Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the 'socialist miracle' to flee famine and dictatorship.By the age of 29 she had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering. Family members had died of starvation; her brother was beaten nearly to death by soldiers. Even smiling and laughing was discouraged.The first time she ran, she was forced abandon her father on his deathbed - crossing the border under a hail of bullets. In...

"From a desperately poor village in northeast China, to a career that took him across the world, this is the incredible story of Li Cunxin -- a story that almost vanished, like so many other peasants' lives, amid revolution and chaos. At age eleven, Li was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange,...

In 1997 the author, aged 17, escaped North Korea for China. Her mother's first words over the telephone to her lost daughter were "don't come back". The reprisals for all of them would have been lethal. Twelve years later she returned to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea in a very costly and dangerous journey. This eloquent book offers the first credible account of ordinary life in North Korea...

The long-running "Ask a North Korean" column produced by NK News in Washington D.C. invites readers to ask questions of recent North Korean defectors about everyday issues that are not generally discussed in the media. Various aspects of life in North Korea are discussed in this book through a series of interviews . These interviews show that even in the world's most authoritarian regime, there is still a degree of normality and continuity.

"1985 -- A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets. In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer -- invaluable details of his government's espionage plans in return for asylum. It's an offer they can't pass up... if it's genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly...

Natalie March is a respected surgeon enjoying a busy, productive life in Washington DC. As her demanding career has left little time for friends or romance, her deepest relationship is with her mother, Vera March, a Russian immigrant and MS patient confined to a rehabilitation center. Vera is still haunted by the fact that her Ukrainian parents, innocent of any wrongdoing, were sent to the gulag, Stalin's notorious network of labor camps, when she...

"Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before [now] has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape"--Amazon.com.

In the months leading up to the August 1991 coup attempt that resulted in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, a young dancer with the Kirov Ballet struggles to decide whether to defect while on an upcoming trip to Paris.

In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America. She is a contradictory celebrity: charismatic and headstrong, lonely and haunted, excited and alienated...