Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: A Vivid Memoir

This memoir succeeds because it taps a contemporary romantic vein. Indeed, Thomas describes how as a child he summons an archetype he calls the "Jolly Marauder"--the spirit of the adventurer. As an adult the call to adventure comes by way of a teaching job in Korea. The ensuing experience in a Confucian prison is refracted thus through the literate, 1st hand account of the Western individual.Where it succeeds is that true to its romantic impulse, the narrative doesn't simply rely on the stock plot of white boy in foreign jail. The narrator instead brings us to the place where the human spirit is pitted against the hard walls of the institution--it's socio-politically complicated, physically harrowing but ultimately a spiritual journey.