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: 4 of 5 stars



This was a New York Times notable book a few years back and lingered on my reading list. Glad I finally got to it. It was a quick read, but one that kept my attention.

Laura Ling and Lisa Ling are both journalists. Embarrassingly, not sure I realized they were two different people until I read this book. Laura was a reporter for CurrentTV (Al Gore's network) and Lisa is best known from being on The View and then being one of Oprah's correspondents.

This book starts when Laura visits China to report on North Koreans who are fleeing the country; she goes to a common location for their defection on a river between the two countries, and when she goes onto North Korean land momentarily (not really mistakenly, but just for a moment), she is captured and imprisoned.

The rest of the book chronicles her imprisonment and her sister Lisa's tireless work to get her freed. Laura is held more under house arrest than in a traditional prison, so she develops some unusual relationships with her captors, some of whom are young women. With the fear of imprisonment in a labor camp lingering, she tries to figure out what the best strategy is for being freed.

Lisa, meanwhile, is in the US and is able to talk to Laura three or four times during her four month captivity. She works her relationships with the media to control how the story is played on TV and to contact government officials who can help. At one point she sees how surreal her situation is when she is corresponding with Al Gore, Bill Clinton, President Obama, and Oprah calls to find out what she can do to help.

This book was unique in that in chronicled both sides of an imprisonment - the person captured and the person fighting to get them back. I really enjoyed learning about how relations worked between countries that had no official diplomatic relations, and how Laura and Lisa became a very unusual conduit through which the US and North Korea could communicate. I was also fascinated by how easily Lisa could influence what the major network were and weren't reporting, and how.






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