The horrors described in Escape from Camp 14 are so extreme that one might assume this is a work of fiction.

But the sad reality is that this is a spellbinding true account of life inside a North Korean prison camp, told from the viewpoint of Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in Camp 14 and fled to the West after a dramatic escape that defies the imagination.

In spare prose Blaine Harden describes Shin’s life as the child of two prisoners who were permitted to mate, with the expectation that any children they bore would spend their entire lives inside the prison complex, surrounded by electric wire designed to kill anyone who touched it.

Human-rights groups believe that as many as 200,000 people are held captive in six sprawling prisons, which the author compares to Nazi concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of inmates are believed to have perished in the North Korea camps, the largest of which is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, bigger in area than Los Angeles.

After Shin’s mother and brother hatched an escape plan, guards tortured Shin to find out what he knew. They first hung him upside down from the ceiling, and then hoisted him over a fire, gradually lowering him until his flesh burned. He passed out. Shin and his father were later forced to watch as guards executed Shin’s mother and brother.

At various times, Shin worked in a coal mine, a pig farm, and a garment factory, where his duty was to carry broken sewing machines up stairs to a repair shop. When he once dropped a machine, breaking it, an angry prison official sliced off part of one of his fingers.

Inmates suffered from constant hunger. If soup spilled on the floor, Shin would lick it up. Inmates ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects to stay alive.

When Shin was 6, a guard surprised students by searching their pockets. When he found five kernels of corn in a girl’s pocket, he beat her on the head until she toppled, bleeding, onto the floor. She died that night.

Growing up in an enclosed totalitarian state, Shin had no concept of what might lie beyond North Korea’s borders, until the day he met a political prisoner named Park who had traveled abroad. They became friends and plotted an escape in early 2005.

One day they were assigned to cut firewood near the perimeter fence. When no one was looking, Park tried to squeeze between two horizontal wires one foot apart, but when he accidentally touched a wire, the electric current killed him. His limp corpse pushed the lower wire down, which allowed Shin to crawl over his friend’s body to freedom.

Their plan had been to flee to China, but without Park, Shin was lost. Harden conveys the drama of Shin’s long trek to the border. His escape and flight seem so risky and wildly improbable that one marvels he pulled it off.

Shin eventually made his way to South Korea and then to the United States. He suffered from depression and nightmares, and assumed that interrogators had tortured and perhaps killed his father because of Shin’s escape.

Harden had doubts about the story after Shin admitted he lied when he claimed he knew nothing about his mother and brother’s escape plan. In fact, he had overheard them discussing it. Harden verified Shin’s account of prison camp conditions by talking to human rights groups and others. The bruises, burns and scars on his body also testified to the extreme abuse he had suffered.

Escape from Camp 14 is timely because of North Korea’s ongoing belligerence and threats, and its recent unsuccessful attempt to launch a satellite into orbit, despite pressure from the United States and other nations.

Harden has written an eye-opening book about a hermetically sealed society, where a family dynasty stays in power through iron rule and citizen paranoia based on fear of being sent to one of the brutal prison camps.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden; Viking, 205 pp., $26.95.

Thirty years ago, a 76-year-old white widow was brutally murdered in her South Carolina home. Police arrested a 23-year-old African-American handyman who had recently cleaned the woman’s windows and gutters. He was quickly tried and sentenced to death.

Appellate courts twice overturned the conviction. Each time, Edward Lee Elmore was reconvicted and sentenced to death again.

Fast-forward to 2009, when a South Carolina judge decided that Elmore could not be executed because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in another case that states could no longer put to death mentally disabled convicts. Elmore was borderline retarded, with an IQ of 61.

Near the end of 2011, a federal appeals court decided that Elmore was entitled to still another trial based, in part, on evidence of “police ineptitude and deceit.” Finally, just after the publication of this important new book, prosecutors struck a deal with Elmore. If he would plead guilty to murdering Dorothy Edwards, he would be released immediately. Elmore accepted the deal, while still maintaining his innocence, and walked to freedom just weeks ago after three decades behind bars, including 27 years on Death Row.

That is a brief overview of this fascinating case, filled with twists and turns and memorable characters, including defense lawyer Diana Holt, who was consumed by her determination to save Elmore from execution.

Author Raymond Bonner is a lawyer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent a decade interviewing the chief characters and poring over court records. The result is a riveting account, in the words of the subtitle, of “a murder case gone wrong.”

Bonner argues persuasively that Elmore was innocent and that the actual killer likely was a white neighbor who was never interviewed by police and who has since died.

The neighbor, Jimmy Holloway, was a frequent visitor who even had a key to Dorothy Edwards’ home. Some thought he was having an affair with her, and may have become enraged when he learned that she was planning a trip to visit her boyfriend. Elmore’s lawyer believes that an argument got out of hand and that Holloway killed Edwards and then called police to say he had found her blood-soaked body in a bedroom closet.

Holloway suggested to police that Elmore might have committed the crime, but police never found solid evidence or a motive that would point to Elmore. One of his fingerprints was found on the back door, but it easily could have been from the time he came to clean her windows and gutters.

Police apparently found it convenient to pin the killing on a mentally handicapped black man with no criminal record rather than consider that the real killer might have been a trusted white neighbor.

Bonner found ample evidence of police, prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, as well as a grossly inadequate defense. One public defender regularly arrived in court drunk.

Attorney Holt comes across as a driven, larger-than-life woman determined to see justice done. Her early years included sexual violation at the hands of her stepfather, drug abuse and time spent in prison for armed robbery. But her burning desire to become a lawyer led her to law school and work with the South Carolina Death Penalty Center, where she was assigned to the Elmore case.

When prosecutors recently offered Elmore his freedom in return for a guilty plea, the likely reason is that they doubted they could win another conviction after all the derelictions Holt had exposed, including evidence that police had planted hair samples from the defendant’s groin to make it appear that he had raped the victim before killing her.

Bonner has written an absorbing real-life crime story. My one hesitation is that the narrative tends to bog down in the second half with overly long excerpts from court testimony.

Despite that reservation, Bonner convincingly demonstrates the myriad ways that lying, sloppy police work, incompetent judges and biased juries can skew cases in a manner that literally can cost a defendant his life.

Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, by Raymond Bonner; Knopf, 298 pp.; $26.95.

Bill Williams is a free-lance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Katherine Boo spent more than three years observing life in a wretched slum in Mumbai, one of India’s largest cities. She tells the story in this absorbing new book, filled with shocking details about wasted lives, gruesome deaths and widespread corruption.

Known as Annawadi, the slum was founded in 1991 by workers trucked in to repair a runway at the city’s international airport. When the work was completed, the workers decided to stay; they settled in snake-filled brush at the edge of the airport. Eventually, 3,000 squatters packed themselves into 335 flimsy Annawadi huts that bordered a sewage lake.

Only six residents held permanent jobs; many eked out a living by collecting recyclables. A teenager and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which scavenger would be the next to die. Out of despair some killed themselves by eating rat poison. Ironically, some residents stayed alive by eating rats.

One day an apparent hit-and-run victim with a mashed, bloody leg lay on a road separating the slum from the airport. He cried out, but no passerby offered to help, and after several hours he died on the pavement. Others perished in similar circumstances. Parents sometimes killed their sickly children “because of the ruinous cost of their care.” One is reminded of Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck when Boo describes the misery she witnessed.

Boo’s credentials are solid. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. She also is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. It may surprise some to know that this is her first book.

The title was inspired by an advertisement for floor tiles on a concrete wall next to the airport emblazoned with words “Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever.”

Boo notes that one-third of the world’s poor people live in India, a nation like many others with extremes of wealth and poverty. A Mumbai billionaire resides in a 27-story house, where he employs 600 servants. And near the Annawadi slum, four luxury hotels jut into the sky.

The book hammers the theme of official corruption involving sanitation workers, teachers, judges, police, politicians, doctors and others.

Teachers pay bribes to get good jobs. Surgeons ask for under-the-table money before they will operate. The outcomes of arrests and trials often hinge on payoffs to police officers and judges. When a slum dweller known as “one leg” sets herself on fire and then falsely accuses a next-door family of burning her, the case drags on for years after the woman dies of her burns. Accused family members know they must to pay bribes if they want to avoid prison sentences.

Policemen sometimes tell boys where they can steal building materials from warehouses and construction sites, as long as the cops receive a payoff after the stolen materials are sold.

When a slum dweller agrees to be part of a scheme to create fictitious kindergartens that will receive a government subsidy, she justifies her actions by asking, “How can anyone say I am doing the wrong when the big people did all the papers – when the big people say that it’s right.”

Plans are in the works to raze Annawadi and 30 other squatter settlements that ring the airport, and move some slum dwellers into apartments. The sewage lake has been filled in to make way for commercial development.

Readers may have difficulty keeping straight all the characters’ names. A glossary and index would have helped.

That said, Boo excels as a relentless inquisitor who personally witnessed most of what she reports in these pages. She also interviewed hundreds of people and pored through thousands of documents.

She offers no solutions. That would have gone beyond the scope of this book. Perhaps her account will encourage others in India and abroad to renew efforts to eradicate conditions that sound like fiction, but sadly are fact.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo; Random House, 256 pp.; $27

Outside the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach’s Old School Square, Cara Nusinov posed for a photograph by the sculpture she designed to pay homage to poetry.

“Art makes poetry touchable,” she said as she stood by the Polka Dot Poetry Peacock, which she created for an art-in-public-spaces project in Coconut Grove. “I imagine people enjoying the poems affixed to the peacock and telling others, or going to the library and checking out books by the poets.”

Nusinov’s comments were very much in the spirit of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, which closed its eighth annual season Jan. 21 after a week of readings and workshops that attracts some of the biggest names in poetry, and its most ardent students.

This year’s special guest was Charles Wright, a renowned American poet who teaches at the University of Virginia. This year’s faculty included Kim Addonizio, Cornelius Eady, Claudia Emerson, David Kirby, Thomas Lux, Gregory Orr, Chase Twichell and Eleanor Wilner.

The festival was founded by Miles Coon, Delray Beach poet, snowbird and retired businessman.

“Poetry is a method of survival. There's something about the rhythm and concentration of language that's profoundly human,” said Coon, who came to poetry late in life. “We turn to poetry at weddings, at funerals, at times of disorder, and that's because death and love are the driving engines of most poetry."

Lux, Coon’s former professor in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, has attended dozens of poetry festivals in his professional lifetime and the Palm Beach Festival since its inception.

“Miles has created the classiest and the best poetry festival in the country. What’s rare is that the primary focus of the festival is teaching,” Lux said. “In one week’s time, we do the equivalent of a half-semester’s worth of graduate work.”

Lux then quoted American poet Stanley Kunitz’s poem, The Layers: “Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered.”

“This event gives the tribe a chance to meet again,” says Lux.

On Saturday, the Crest Theatre auditorium was at capacity for a 2 p.m. panel discussion with the eight members of the faculty. Poets and would-be poets of every size, shape, color and age milled around discussing the art form.

They were also anticipating the evening’s lineup – a coffee house, party and performance poetry event featuring New York poet Vanessa Hidary (the Hebrew Mamacita) and Jamaal May, a two-time individual World Poetry Slam finalist.

The afternoon panel gave each poet the opportunity to choose one of his or her favorite poems to read. A discussion over whether form is restrictive or can open you up to creativity gave rise to a spontaneous discussion on ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.

Ikebana is a creative expression, but governed by strict rules. There are three elements to ikebana (heaven, earth, man), so Lux jokingly declared: “There are three elements to making a good poem – only we don’t know what they are.”

Rosella Stern, 70, of Ormond Beach, is a Yeats scholar and retired professor. She lost her poetry partner of 40 years in a tragic accident, and became motivated to write and publish a book of poetry in her honor.

A friend in California heard about the festival and called Stern. “You must go,” she ordered, and go Stern did.

She writes poetry that she calls rants. Her latest rant is titled Yanqui Pig Dog Poem (A Rant for the 99ers) in which the last line of the poem is “take off your suit and bark.”

“The festival is a rich and meaningful experience for me. It was sometimes scary, but I am grateful to have the space and privilege to pursue what I love and get support at the same time,” Stern said.

Kurt Brown, a retired professor, founder of the Aspen Writers’ Conference and the husband of poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, has written six books of poetry.

“As someone who used to run writer’s conferences, I know a good one when I see it,” says Brown, who has served as the festival’s marketing director. “It starts at the top. Miles creates a community feeling whereby people feel safe to share their work without fear of criticism.”

“I always say, there’s no reason a conference like this should work: You fly a long distance to get here, you pay a lot of money for hotels, you bring your innermost thoughts to be criticized by total strangers, but somehow it all works.”

And there are other good reasons for that, Brown added.

“And besides all that, I like to soak up the sun and have some Key lime pie.”

Although some people viewed John Brown as a madman, his daring 1859 raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., helped galvanize anti-slavery sentiment in the North.

In Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz has written an engrossing account of Brown’s life and singular devotion to the abolition cause. With hindsight, Horwitz suggests that Harpers Ferry seems like “an al-Qaeda prequel,” with a homegrown fundamentalist consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launching a suicidal attack on a symbol of American power.

From his days as a youth, Brown abhorred slavery. At age 12 he witnessed the beating of a slave boy with iron shovels, and later helped escaping slaves travel North on the Underground Railroad. He cited the Bible in claiming to be on a divine mission to abolish slavery.

In the 1850s Brown traveled through Northern states and Canada seeking volunteer fighters and financial backing. Potential recruits often were perplexed about Brown’s goals, in part because he seems to have changed his mind frequently about exactly what he hoped to accomplish by capturing a government arsenal.

Did Brown intend to arm slaves with thousands of guns taken from the arsenal? The specifics were never entirely clear. Before the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown convened his supporters, who drafted a constitution and declared that they wanted to form a slave-free nation.

Setting out in the middle of the night, Brown’s ragtag group of 19 fighters attacked and easily captured the lightly guarded arsenal, where 100,000 guns were stored. But within 30 hours government troops took back the arsenal, leaving most insurgents dead, dying or wounded. Brown and a few of his comrades were tried, convicted and hanged.

The attack on Harpers Ferry divided the abolition movement. Many who opposed slavery also opposed resorting to violence to end it.

During Brown’s trial, some suggested that he plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but he flatly rejected such a defense. To the end he was willing to die in the cause of abolition, while asking why it was a crime to try to free slaves.

Among Brown’s prominent supporters was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who suggested that Brown was “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

Horwitz places Brown’s crusade in the context of the nation’s deep division over slavery. “Harpers Ferry,” he writes, “helped propel [Abraham] Lincoln into the White House, where he would ultimately fulfill Brown’s mission. … Harpers Ferry wasn’t simply a prelude to secession and civil war. In many respects, it was a dress rehearsal.”

Lincoln was a late convert to abolition. A native of slave state Kentucky, he initially thought that slavery would fade away and that former slaves would be resettled in Africa. But three years after Harpers Ferry, with the nation mired in the Civil War inferno, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the South.

Midnight Rising includes 70 pages of notes, a bibliography and an index, as well as portraits and maps, making this an essential work for school and public libraries.

The author deserves credit for writing an even-handed account of a complex man. It would have been easy to dismiss Brown as a crackpot, but Horwitz eschewed that approach and instead sought to get inside Brown’s mind and heart to learn as much as possible about what drove him to embark on a passionate, yet foolhardy, mission that had little chance of success.

Horwitz scoured letters, journals, speeches and books to better understand Brown and the culture that shaped him.

The result is a meticulous tour of an important slice of American history, with Horwitz weaving together vignettes of frontier hardship, the cruelties of slavery, the savagery of battle, the armory takeover, and the trials and executions of Brown and his soldiers.

Midnight Rising is historical non-fiction at its best, coming alive in the hands of a superb storyteller.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz; Henry Holt, 365 pp., $29