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My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea
by Charles Robert Jenkins
In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border.
He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.
"Jenkins's book is oddly compelling. The blank ordinariness of his character brings out the moral and physical ugliness of life in North Korea." —The New Yorker
This information about The Reluctant Communist was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Charles Robert Jenkins was a former United States Army soldier who lived in North Korea from 1965 to 2004. He lived in Sado, Japan with his family until he died in December 2017. Jim Frederick was a contributing editor at TIME Magazine. He was previously editor of TIME's International editions, Editor of TIME.com as well as an Executive Editor. From 2006 to 2008, he was a Senior Editor in TIME's London office and, before that, TIME's Tokyo Bureau Chief.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Black Hearts. One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death" (Crown Publishing, 2010) which the New York Times Book Review called "Riveting... A narrative that combines elements of 'In Cold Blood' and 'Black Hawk Down' with a touch of 'Apocalypse Now' as it builds toward its terrible climax... Frederick's extraordinary book is a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters... Extraordinary." The Guardian called it "the best book by far about the Iraq war - a rare combination of cold truth and warm compassion."
Frederick is co-author, with former US Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, of "The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea," (University of California Press, 2008) which Commentary magazine called "one of the most important and devastating accounts of life inside a totalitarian society." He graduated with a BA in English Literature from Columbia University and received an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. Frederick died suddenly in 2014 shortly after he and his wife moved from New York City to San Francisco to focus on writing books and screenplays.
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