Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

#253
Title: Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
Author: Cullen Thomas
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2007
Country: South Korea
347 pages

Audiobook: here

Narratives of foreign incarceration stints typically combine complaints about the institutions inadequacy and sadism, sometimes coupled with self-reflection. Brother One Cell has both, with a believable progression from naivete to indignation to receptivity. Compared to Fellows's prison experience, Thomas's was fairly benign, though still awful in many ways. Though it moved slowly at times, it sustained my interest and I found Thomas's depiction of his own development convincing. Thomas's language is sometimes poetic and sometimes strained. I would have liked more about description of his decision to smuggle drugs into South Korea, and more explanation of the title (it commands only a few sentences). Thomas refers to Kang Chol Hwan's Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, a North Korean prison narrative taking place on the other side of the not-too-distant border, and they would be interesting to read in tandem.

Listening to the audiobook version confirmed my extreme dislike for voice characterizations in non-fiction. Many of the accents attempted by the reader sounded similar, and those that didn't sounded like caricatures.