Author : J.E. Hoare
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 20,96 MB
Release : 2021-11-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9004213791
North Korea is not easily accessible, but boasts some of the most beautiful scenery in the Korean Peninsula, and arguably in East Asia. Travel to and in North Korea is tightly controlled, while political, economic, social and cultural life is played out in terms of a not readily understood philosophy, known as juche.
Author : Bruce E. Bechtol
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 40,81 MB
Release : 2013
Category : History
ISBN : 161234612X
North Korea has remained a thorn in the side of the United States ever since its creation in the aftermath of the Korean conflict of 1950 - 1953. Crafting a foreign policy that effectively deals with North Korea, while still ensuring stability and security on the Korean Peninsula - and in Northeast Asia as a whole - has proved very challenging for successive American administrations. In the wake of ruler Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011, analysts and policymakers continue to speculate about the effect his last years as leader will have on the future of North Korea. Bruce Bechtol, Jr. conte.
Author : Heonik Kwon
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 14,33 MB
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1442215771
This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.
Author : Paek Nam-nyong
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 45,69 MB
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0231551401
Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists’ past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge’s own marital troubles. A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea’s most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.
Author : Seonhye Sin
Publisher : Oro Editions
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 42,41 MB
Release : 2019-12-09
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781943532773
North Korea, the world's most closed off country, has begun to make a different move. Kim Jung-un has opened dialogue with South Korea and is also preparing to correspond with other countries. There are both doubtful and positive responses to this change. However, this opens a new possible scenario for North Korea in the future. This book is focused on the potential that the country has. Of course, they have lots of issues, but they can be a sustainable country. The research begins with the past and existing condition of the country, which is Socialist government, and eludes to the future. To set the strategies for future development, we need to focus on two types of precedents: Post-socialist countries and megalopolis. Based on these two features, this book suggests a new North Korean national planning, called H-city. H-city will be the main structure for future development. However, at the same time, micro-scale developments should be encouraged too. What can be the catalysts for that? This book is focused on train stations, markets, and the area between them. The H-city with the small catalysts can make people imagine a new possibility of North Korea.
Author : Kongdan Oh
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 24,73 MB
Release : 2021-06-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1538151391
Explore North Korea, one of the most secretive countries in the world. This thoughtful book provides a concise introduction to North Korea. Two leading experts, Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig, trace the country’s history from its founding in 1948 and describe the many facets of its political, economic, social, and cultural life. The authors illuminate a hidden nation dominated by three generations of the secretive Kim regime, a family dynasty more suited to the Middle Ages than the contemporary era. North Korea has a robust if outmoded military force, including a growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, to deter and defend against foreign attacks and to maintain independence and isolation from the rest of the world. The struggling economy, disconnected from the global marketplace, operates under harsh international sanctions. All North Koreans, from the highest party cadres to the youngest children living in prison camps, are essentially servants of the leader. Despite Kim Jong-un’s despotic control, the authors argue that North Korea cannot continue on its current path indefinitely. Kim treats even his closest associates harshly, and the gap is widening between his elite supporters, numbering a million or so, and the other twenty-four million North Koreans. The economic and technological gap between South Korea and North Korea is increasing as well, and younger people are becoming disenchanted as they gradually learn more about the outside world.
Author : Bradley K. Martin
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 912 pages
File Size : 32,5 MB
Release : 2007-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1429906995
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea's two ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Lifting North Korea's curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society, that to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of megalomaniacs. To North Koreans, the Kims are more than just leaders. Kim Il-Sung is the country's leading novelist, philosopher, historian, educator, designer, literary critic, architect, general, farmer, and ping-pong trainer. Radios are made so they can only be tuned to the official state frequency. "Newspapers" are filled with endless columns of Kim speeches and propaganda. And instead of Christmas, North Koreans celebrate Kim's birthday--and he presents each child a present, just like Santa. The regime that the Kim Dynasty has built remains technically at war with the United States nearly a half century after the armistice that halted actual fighting in the Korean War. This fascinating and complete history takes full advantage of a great deal of source material that has only recently become available (some from archives in Moscow and Beijing), and brings the reader up to the tensions of the current day. For as this book will explain, North Korea appears more and more to be the greatest threat among the Axis of Evil countries--with some defector testimony warning that Kim Jong-Il has enough chemical weapons to wipe out the entire population of South Korea.
Author : Andrei Lankov
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 41,37 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0199390037
In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive
Author : Krys Lee
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 44,45 MB
Release : 2016-08-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0399563938
"Lee takes us into urgent and emotional novelistic terrain: the desperate and tenuous realms defectors are forced to inhabit after escaping North Korea.” –Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son "The more confusing and horrible our world becomes, the more critical the role of fiction in communicating both the facts and the meaning of other people’s lives. Krys Lee joins writers like Anthony Marra, Khaled Hosseini and Elnathan John in this urgent work." –San Francisco Chronicle Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long made him an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when they flee their homes, finding themselves in a small Chinese town just across the river from North Korea. As they fight to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju, Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for? Transporting the reader to one of the least-known and most threatening environments in the world, and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desperate circumstances, How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers. A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal One of The Millions' most anticipated books of the second half of 2016 One of Elle.com's "11 Best Books to Read in August" One of Bookpage's "Six Stellar Summer Debuts"
Author : Bandi
Publisher : House of Anansi
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 11,56 MB
Release : 2017-03-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1487002726
Authored by an anonymous writer and smuggled out of North Korea, The Accusation is the first work of fiction to come out of the country and a moving portrayal of life under a totalitarian regime. In 1989, a North Korean dissident writer, known to us only by the pseudonym Bandi, began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung’s totalitarian regime. Smuggled out of North Korea and published around the world, The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window into this most secretive of countries. Bandi’s profound, deeply moving, vividly characterized stories tell of ordinary men and women facing the terrible absurdity of daily life in North Korea: a factory supervisor caught between loyalty to an old friend and loyalty to the Party; a woman struggling to feed her husband through the great famine; the staunch Party man whose actor son reveals to him the theatre that is their reality; the mother raising her child in a world where the all-pervasive propaganda is the very stuff of childhood nightmare. The Accusation is a heartbreaking portrayal of the realities of life in North Korea. It is also a reminder that humanity can sustain hope even in the most desperate of circumstances — and that the courage of free thought has a power far beyond those who seek to suppress it.
