Review: Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home

Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura Ling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read an aside in Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives that altruistic eye doctor Sanduk Ruit connived to get TV journalist Lisa Ling covertly into North Korea as part of his medical outreach team. This resulted in the National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea which was remarkable not only in being able to document his successful surgery in the highly controlled country, but the overt adulation given to the then-Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Kim Jong-il by the patients. Why did Ruit endanger the chance for future direct medical assistance efforts, let alone his person and crew? That is not the over point of this book, but it does hand over as Lisa Ling's sister becomes the first American sentenced to a North Korean labor camp. While she herself worked on a documentary about defectors, will North Korean officials lean of Lisa Ling's subterfuge and negative portrayal?

This is a tense telling of the capture, imprisonment and eventual release to a stoic, unsmiling Bill Clinton finally resolving the 2009 imprisonment of American journalists by North Korea. This was also with a backdrop of North Korea irritating the community of nations with a satellite launch, nuclear test, and missile tests. Very interesting here is how Ling's supporters had to navigate the rocky shoals of protocol and ego among the first-term Obama administration and potentially helpful outsiders as Gore and Governor Bill Richardson.

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