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As we are gearing up to comment on a host of new books on North Korea, you might be interested in also perusing last year’s reading list. Summer reading on abductions? Hey, this is a North Korea blog, and what the country has done makes for some pretty amazing stories. Unfortunately, most are tragedies. Daniel [...]
Ken Gause is one of the most deeply knowledgeable North Korea watchers in the country. His specialty is close analysis of personnel movements within the major government institutions, including the military: the cycles of promotions and purges that are a central feature of the highly personalist North Korean political system. His most recent book, North [...]
Most North Korea watchers have at one point or another stumbled across Kimjongilia. The flower was actually bred by Japanese horticulturalist Kamo Mototeru to commemorate Kim Jong-il’s birthday in 1988. If you need a 100 page book on the flower, the foreign language publishing house in Pyongyang offers up a treatise with “Absolutely Everything One [...]
In Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden tells the astonishing tale of Shin Dong-hyuk: his birth and upbringing amid the barbarism of a North Korean prison camp; his betrayal of family; and his eventual escape and resettlement in the United States. Through the extraordinary arc of Shin’s life, Harden illuminates the North Korea that exists [...]
The last two years have seen several thoughtful efforts to grapple with the nature of the North Korean political system, a topic we are also starting to work on. On our short-list (with Amazon links if you want to build your library): B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It [...]
The first thing I do when I get a new book on North Korea is turn to the footnotes and references. With limited information, much of what is written simply rearranges the puzzle pieces we all have at hand. In the case of Jonathan Pollack’s No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security, the [...]
