A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea
Written by Sébastien Falletti and Eunsun Kim
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
4/5
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About this audiobook
By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun too was in danger of starving. Finally, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were embarking on a journey that would take them nine long years to complete.
Told with grace and courage, her memoir is a riveting expose of North Korea's totalitarian regime and, ultimately, a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
Sébastien Falletti
SEBASTIEN FALLETTI has been working as the Korea correspondent for the French newspaper Le Figaro since 2009. He covers political and business news across Asia, including North Korea. He also contributes regularly to Le Point Magazine and has published a biography of Alfred Dreyfus. Born in Paris, Sébastien studied at Sorbonne University and the London School of Economics, and is now based in Seoul and Shanghai.
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Reviews for A Thousand Miles to Freedom
95 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Engaging and thrilling, but it was a very quick read. Thankful she was able to share her story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The writing is not always the best. Sometimes it was tricky to figure out what she meant. She does not spend a lot of time on her childhood in North Korea. The majority of the book is about her time as a fugitive in China. It is a story people need to here. The situation of the North Korean who are trying to escape and flee is very important.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Such an amazing story. This family fought hard to survive and then persevere. A worthy book for anyone wanting to know about the courage of n Koreans wanting freedom.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eunsun clearly has no flair for storytelling and this is a fairly boring from a narrative standpoint; there's never any dramatic tension. It only merits three stars writing-wise but since she wrote the book as a sort of "fuck you" to the North Korean regime, I'm giving her a bonus star just to be supportive.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I won this book and agreed to give it an honest review. I was so caught up in Eunsun Kim plight that I worried about her and the brave struggles of her family, since her father and her grandparents starved to death in their North Korean villages due to a famine that swept the country, The dictator's need to control his people and monitor all news about his country that would shame their regime. Escaping to China, the three women believe they could have a better life only to find mistreatment, but at least they had food, but could they live like this?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This memoir has a personal, almost conversational tone, but what a moving, heartbreaking, inspiring, fascinating story she has to tell. Eunsun Kim spent her early years happily enough in North Korea, and that was interesting in itself to read about, but then famine drove her family across the border into China and set them on a decade long journey--even taking them into Mongolia--before she, her sister, and her mother were able to finally settle in South Korea.A Thousand Miles to Freedom paints a vivid picture of living on the edge in North Korea and then China. It's an intimate story about a part of the world that's hard to get information about, and that alone would draw me to the book. I read it in one sitting because it's not long and is incredibly gripping.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A beyond belief story of a family escaping the dictatorship of North Korea, with more hardship than any person should be able to take. I have briefly met Eunsun Kim, a lovely, soft spoken but determined girl, and the strength of this story comes from the ordinariness of its main characters. They could have been anyone, they were in no way activists fighting for a cause, they were only running to try to save their lives. Unfortunately the book is marred by the passionless language of he reteller Falletti and the lack of structure in the writing. This story deserves better treatment than it was given.