(To buy book, go to In Order to Live.)

Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live is not a policy paper on North Korea, it is something more valuable: a firsthand account of what life under an authoritarian regime actually costs its people. Park, who escaped North Korea at thirteen with her family and later survived trafficking in China before reaching South Korea, writes with unflinching honesty about starvation, state control, and the human trafficking networks that preyed on defectors like her.

For anyone working in sanctions, human rights due diligence, or anti-trafficking compliance, this memoir does what regulatory training rarely can: it puts a face and a name to the populations that sanctions regimes and forced labor typologies are meant to protect.