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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, Laura Ling and Lisa Ling, William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2010, 322 pages, $26.99. Inscrutable. Rightly or wrongly, Westerners have long used the cliche-charged word stereotypically to describe the tantalizing, seemingly unknowable mysteries of Far Eastern cultures- and the dizzying array of labyrinthine philosophies, thought processes, and diplomatic dynamics that comprise them. Arguably, no culture-East, West, North, or South-is more inscrutable, more impenetrable to the world's probing eyes and inquiring minds, than North Korea's. The tiny, impoverished Communist country sees itself still technically at war with both South Korea and the United States nearly 60 years after the unfi nished fi ght for dominance over the Korean peninsula began. In the fevered hearts and minds of the regimented millions who look to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il for inspiration and guidance, the Korean confl ict still rages. It's a given that North Korea doesn't play by the world's rules- or laws of the universe, for that matter-vacillating wildly between war-mongering rhetoric, conciliatory gestures, missile launches, nuclear threats, and general cage rattling, sometimes all in the course of a single week. That's why readers may welcome the rare ability to catch a glimpse through an unguarded window into Kim's curtained country and its renegade, irrational regime afforded by Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home, co-authored by Laura Ling and Lisa Ling. Written in alternating captioned fi rst-person accounts, the journalist sisters provide versions of a story that are like two sides of a coin: Laura held captive in Pyongyang and The View and National Geographic Explorer veteran Lisa chronicling stateside and worldwide efforts to pressure North Korea to release her younger sibling. Laura travails under months of house arrest and trial by a kangaroo court while the betterknown Lisa marshals the forces within her mighty rolodex to hit just the right combination of political powerbrokers to help free her sister. The tandem narrative device, distracting at fi rst because of the temptation to focus on the more exotic "Laura" entries, ultimately helps to give depth and context to a complicated situation, in the process providing two memoirs for the price of one. The wheels for this international drama were set in motion with Laura Ling's Current TV channel assignment to document the plight of refugees fl eeing North Korea's repression and crumbling economy. But when Ling, producer Una Lee, and another crew member traveled to China for clandestine meetings with these escapees, then naively but knowingly followed a guide across an ice-covered river into North Korea, North Korean guards pursued them as they fl ed back to the Chinese side of the river bank. …