Journey into the life of a renegade American who decided to defect to the most reclusive and oppressive nation in modern history: North Korea. An American idealist defects to North Korea in the 1970's only to discover the true horrors of this Stalinist state. What happens next would shock even those familiar with authoritarian regimes.

The author, an American Foreign Service worker in china, meets a man by the name of "David." David entrusts the author with his diary and makes the author promise him that the diary will be shown to the world as "evidence of what North Korea is really like."...