Baseline

"It was not meaningful to [Shin] that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty, and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world's largest prison. His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family, and tortured him over a fire."—Blaine Harden (page 121)

"Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps' regime of hard labor, hunger, beatings, and sleep deprivation. […] The Party [said Kang Chol-hwan] saw suicide as an attempt to escape its grasp, and if the individual who had tried the trick wasn't around to pay for it, someone else needed to be found. […] North Korea's National Security Agency warns all prisoners that suicide will be punished with longer sentences for surviving relatives…"—Blaine Harden (page 72)

"But South Koreans struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, and education-crazed culture. […] South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country…"—Blaine Harden (page 172)