The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Started reading this book last night. Apparently President Bush is a fan and I wanted to see what the big deal is about. I'm about halfway through and it's pretty gut-wrenching stuff. It's about a boy whose parents and grandparents are ethnic Koreans living in Japan who move to North Korea to assist in turning the country into a worker's paradise. Their efforts are rewarded by being thrown in a concentration camp. The boy, who is 8 when he arrives at the camp, details the cold, the beatings by his teachers -- and above all else -- the endless hunger:

I was not the only prisoner in Yodok to hunt rats. There were many devotees of the sport, and each had his or her own technique for trapping and preserving the game. I discovered that a friend of mine had turned his hut into a full-blown breeding ground. The other kids and I had noticed that he was always in good shape, while we, despite our little supplements, remained hungry and thin. Was he stealing food? Was someone giving it to him? Fearing that we had begun to suspect him of collaborating with the guards, the boy called us over to his hut one day for an explanation. His family was allotted two rooms, just like we were, but instead of using all their living space, they all squeezed into one room and left the second space entirely for the rats. To attract them, my friend had stolen corn from the fields and spread it on the floor. The plan worked perfectly, and the number of nests multiplied. The only maintenance required was sprinkling a little corn on the floor every few days. Whenever he got hungry, all my friend had to do was grab a wire trap and fish out a rat. It was a veritable pantry, the secret to his robust health.

Those camps, of course, still exist to this day. Given the constant food shortages in the country as a whole my guess is that if anything the living conditions have only deteriorated.