"This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and, episode by episode, reveals the inner workings of its isolated society. Jenkins mounted numerous failed escape attempts, was indoctrinated against his will into North Korea's communist cadre system, and endured hunger, cold, and isolation. His loneliness was relieved in 1980 by his marriage to Hitomi Soga. a young Japanese woman whom the North Koreans had abducted as part of a wider campaign to teach Japanese to future spies. Jenkins's account of their life together and as parents of two daughters, as welt as their improbable journey to freedom, which began in 2002, brings this story to a close. Four decades in the world's least known, least visited, and least understood land profoundly changed him; his memoir now offers the reader a powerful testament to the human spirit."--BOOK JACKET.

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. While both the United States and North Korea would insist that Jenkins had defected for political reasons, the truth, as we learn in this riveting autobiography, was more mundane: he was scared, drunk, and homesick, and he believed his action would net him back to the States where he'd face 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.

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.

A chilling, riveting account based on newly released Russian documentation that reveals Joseph Stalin’s true motives—and the extent of his enduring commitment to expanding the Soviet empire—during the years in which he seemingly collaborated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the capitalist West. At the Big Three conferences of World War II, Joseph Stalin persuasively played the role of a great world leader, whose primary concerns lay in international strategy and power politics, and not communist ideology. Now, using recently uncovered documents, Robert Gellately conclusively shows that, in fact, the dictator was biding his time, determined to establish Communist regimes across Europe and beyond. His actions during those years—and the poorly calculated responses to them from the West—set in motion what would eventually become the Cold War. Exciting, deeply engaging, and shrewdly perceptive, Stalin’s Curse is an unprecedented revelation of the sinister machinations of Stalin’s Kremlin.

Robert Taylor was a reluctant, yet active, witness to history-Hollywood's, the country's, his own. He was dubbed "The Man With the Perfect Profile." Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood & Communism goes inside the personality to find the flesh-and-blood man underneath. The actor's meteoric rise was credited to his "pretty boy" looks, an image encouraged by MGM when studios owned their actors and created public personas. This, coupled with the sheltered, almost emasculating childhood he had endured, created in him a survivor who rose above family, the studio system, Barbara Stanwyck, and, as what he considered to be a curse, one of the most beautiful male faces in Hollywood history. The book delves into his marriage to Barbara Stanwyck, as well as usually discreet, but intense, love affairs. Beauties such as Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Yvonne DeCarlo fell under his spell. Attention is paid to his second marriage to Ursula Thiess, which brought about his roles as father and husband. Robert Taylor finally found happiness. A reluctant witness to the Second World War and what led up to it, Robert Taylor was a staunch Conservative, subpoenaed before the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in American Films. He enlisted in the Navy. Afterward, he returned to civilian life, Hollywood, and Barbara. He and his wife had changed. He became a reluctant witness to their relationship's deterioration. He watched Hollywood evolve, ultimately becoming the longest-running contract actor in film history. He was a reluctant witness to the dawn of television; initially he wanted none of it. When he realized he had to go along or by the wayside, he gave in. In later years, he was a reluctant witness again to ever-changing winds of politics. Friends and compatriots who shared his ultra-Conservative views wanted him to stand publicly for shared values. They saw him as the right leader to move their state forward. Yet he was reluctant. Robert Taylor's career spanned nearly the entire history of Hollywood, from early days to beyond the fall of the strict studio system. His life was the American dream, from naive, small-town Nebraska boy to a celluloid heartthrob known around the world. Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood, & Communism tells it all."

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's "first line of defense" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's "commonsense anticommunism," she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

"Human rights and the protection of refugees is not a concern of left or right, or of the US only; it is an issue of importance to all Koreans, and indeed all countries. Haggard and Noland provide compelling evidence of the ongoing transformation of North Korean society and offer thoughtful proposals as to how the outside world might facilitate peaceful evolution."--Yoon Young-kwan, former Foreign Minister, Rob Moo-byun government --Book Jacket