Jim Frederick was born in Lake Forest, Illinois on November 22, 1971. He received a B.A. in English literature from Columbia University and an M.B.A. from the Stern School of Business at New York University. He worked at Men's Journal and Working Woman magazine. He spent most of his career at Time Inc. as a reporter and editor for Money and Time magazines. He left company in 2013. He was the co-author, with Charles Robert Jenkins, of The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea. He also wrote Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death. He died of cardiac arrhythmia and arrest on July 31, 2014 at the age of… 42.