Prison Break Opens Door to the Grand Conspiracy

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	• Escape: The true story of the only Westerner ever to break out of Thailand's Bangkok Hilton David McMillan Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd., 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Break Out from a Nightmare

Most of us might pass by gut-wrenching stories of prison escapes, but this true prison break story breaks the mold. It is really a story of loyalty and friendship.
Without McMillan's passionate girlfriend and his enduring friends he would have never managed the near-impossible jailbreak. Every chapter left me wanting more, and as ever, the truth is stranger than fiction.

Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail

A Powerful Real-life Break-out

I kept turning the pages on this one: a surprise for me because I don't like drug-smugglers and was expecting something smug from the one who got away. Every chapter is a self-contained story building up to the big night. Actually, the big night becomes less important since we know he got out but that doesn't spoil the story any more than knowing Charles de Gaulle wasn't assassinated in Day of the Jackal. Most of the people David meets in the prison are instantly real. I, like most readers, would want more of the life that led to the arrest and what happened next. I suppose that's coming and there couldn't be more packed in to a book 300 pages long. ESCAPE is a book I'll read again and don't hesitate to recommend to all readers.

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Prison Break Autobiography Without Tears

Thailand's Klong Prem prison has become a synonym for Asian hell-holes, a reputation not reduced by the large numbers of jail tourists who schedule a visit in their itineraries to their imprisoned countrymen and women between shopping at the floating market and swilling Singha beer in a Patpong girlie bar.
David McMillan was held in the `Bangkok Hilton' awaiting trial on drug charges in the mid-`90s for almost two years. If his trial had ended the way most local trials do, he might still be there today, as sentences range between thirty and ninety-nine years. Before his trial ended, McMillan escaped, becoming the first Westerner to successfully break out of Klong Prem, a feat no one has yet repeated.
ESCAPE is not the usual, crying, my-life-in-hell story. Firstly, the author makes no excuses for his life as a drug smuggler. Emotional responses to the good, the bad and the ugly in the 12,000-strong prison complex are reported through the reactions of the fifty or more fellow inmates who McMillan describes as he relentlessly pursues his search for the perfect escape plan.
Secondly, the circumstances of how McMillan came to be arrested in Chinatown and why so many agencies are set against him are revealed in the style of a thriller. Despite the author appearing often cold and ruthless, this reader could not help being alongside him as both accomplices and plans fall away.
Supporting characters are surprisingly varied for the closed environment: not only Eddie the junkie-courier from Switzerland, Chang the Taiwanese cook, Kelvin the sorrowful Hawaiian, Rick the conniving English bar owner, but also Germans pretending to be barons, Nigerians actually princes, young clubbers, jaded Americans, mysterious Chinese and a mad anarchist-scientist serving fifty years' for being the translator on a Canadian drug deal. As well, a motley collection of languishing Australians, surreally presented at a real embassy Christmas party inside the prison grounds.
Throughout escape plans A-to-Z (including a comic attempt to brazen through the corridors dressed as UN medics pretending to evacuate prisoners during an epidemic), McMillan is supported or hindered by those closest to him, including his girlfriend, a part-time jazz singer from New Zealand.
Despite the hard-boiled waterfront-reporter voice of the author, I couldn't help wondering if the true McMillan began as one of the near-suicides in the remand section, quickly passed aside in the early chapters, before changing into the one who got away. My copy was published in Singapore where the death penalty still applies; appropriate for a book that never laments, apologises or preaches, yet tells more in fewer words about people facing death or oblivion than books twice as thick.

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Prison Break Opens Door to the Grand Conspiracy

I read this book six months ago and only now begin to see all the links - and I'm no conspiracy-theory nutcase. ESCAPE reads like a racy, often amusing thriller while giving the absolute truth on one of the world's scariest prisons, and fine instructions on how to escape. Yet after re-reading THE UNDERGROUND EMPIRE (the 1980s tome on governments using crooks) the added layers of ESCAPE began to show. There are puzzles, joke names (not unusual when names are changed to protect the guilty), slices of numerology, mathematical sequences and some real poetry concealed in the text (for example, a weather-stained wall described as a colorful mural, followed by lunch: ` ...a dark bROTH CO-mingling with...' my CAPS reveal Rothko); yet it is all true. This man was the only European to break out, and almost everyone he meets on the way appears as though they were meant to pass through like some Zen journey. ESCAPE reads at times like Dashiell Hammett and then an early Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (Perennial Fiction Library) with revelations from the Illuminati. The feeling of being manipulated as by THE MAGUS. My second thought was the story is some elaborate journalists' practical joke such as Southern/Hoffenberg's CANDY. Those books are all fiction, this is not - the history is in the newspapers, although only the paper archives as the trail goes cold and transforms with the dawn of the internet age. ESCAPE is a book that won't leave you alone. There is more in this book with every reading

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Among the 600 foreigners jailed in the 'Bangkok Hilton', one man resolves to do what no other has done: Escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan's perilous break-out from Thailand's most notorious prison. After more than a year in prison and two weeks before a near-certain death sentence, McMillan escapes, never to be seen in Thailand again.

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