Blaine Harden has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 118 ratings. The most-rated is Escape from Camp 14.
Escape from Camp 14
Summary
The shocking story of one of the few people born in a North Korean political prison to have escaped and survived. North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped - but Shin Dong-hyuk did. In Escape from Camp 14, acclaimed journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk and, through the lens of Shin’s life, unlocks the secrets of the world’s most repressive totalitarian state. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence: he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his own family. Through Harden’s harrowing narrative of Shin’s life and remarkable escape, he offers an unequaled inside account of one of the world’s darkest nations and a riveting tale of endurance, courage, and survival. Blaine Harden is a contributor to the Economist and has formerly served as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is the author of Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent and A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
©2012 Blaine Harden (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
King of Spies
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of Escape from Camp 14 returns with the untold story of one of the most powerful spies in American history, shedding new light on the US role in the Korean War and its legacy. In 1946, Master Sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training, he was sent to Korea, then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most US spies - Nichols was a seventh-grade dropout - he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of America's chosen puppet in South Korea, President Syngman Rhee, and became a pivotal player in the Korean War, warning months in advance about the North Korean invasion, breaking enemy codes, and identifying most of the targets destroyed by American bombs in North Korea. But Nichols' triumphs had a dark side. Immersed in a world of torture and beheadings, he became a spymaster with his own secret base, his own covert army, and his own rules. He recruited agents from refugee camps and prisons, sending many to their deaths on reckless missions. His closeness to Rhee meant that he witnessed - and did nothing to stop or even report - the slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges. Nichols' clandestine reign lasted for an astounding 11 years. In this riveting book, Blaine Harden traces Nichols' unlikely rise and tragic ruin, from his birth in an operatically dysfunctional family in New Jersey to his sordid postwar decline, which began when the US military sacked him in Korea, sent him to an air force psych ward in Florida, and subjected him - against his will - to months of electroshock therapy. But King of Spies is not just the story of one American spy: With napalmed villages and severed heads, high-level lies and long-running cover-ups, it reminds us that the darkest sins of the Vietnam War - and many other conflicts that followed - were first committed in Korea.
©2017 Blaine Harden (P)2017 Penguin Audio
Flucht aus Lager 14
Summary
Das diktatorisch regierte Nordkorea ist fast völlig isoliert, aggressiv und bettelarm, und es hält rund 150.000 seiner Bürger in Lagern gefangen, die vergleichbar sind mit NS-Konzentrationslagern oder dem Gulag. Da die Lager seit Jahrzehnten existieren, gibt es inzwischen Tausende, die dort aufgewachsen sind. Einer von ihnen ist Shin Dong-hyuk. Blaine Harden erzählt die Geschichte des 1982 im sogenannten Lager 14 geborenen Shin, der bis zu seiner Flucht nie etwas anderes kennengelernt hatte als die grausame und primitive Lagerwelt. Menschlichkeit, Vertrauen, Wärme, Zuneigung und jegliche Errungenschaften der Zivilisation waren ihm unbekannt, Hunger, Misstrauen und brutale Züchtigungen hingegen Alltag. Shins Zeugenbericht gibt einen tiefen Einblick in die unmenschlichen Lebensverhältnisse, die in dieser Lagerhölle herrschen und schildert das berührende Schicksal eines jungen Mannes, dem wie durch ein Wunder die Flucht in die Freiheit gelang.
©2015 SAGA Egmont. Übersetzung von Udo Rennert (P)2015 SAGA Egmont
The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot
Summary
From the best-selling author of Escape from Camp 14, the murderous rise of North Korea's founding dictator and the fighter pilot who faked him out In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, New York Times best-selling author Blaine Harden tells the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was playing a high-risk game of deception - and escape. As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to love his Great Leader. That was until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly $1 million today). The theft - just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953 - electrified the world and incited Kim's bloody vengeance. During the Korean War, the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans. Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the role of Mao and Stalin in Kim's shadowy rise as well as from never-before-released US intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world's longest-lasting totalitarian state.
©2015 Blaine Harden (P)2015 Penguin Audio