An exciting escape closes this urgent, well-rendered attempt to penetrate North Korea’s cynical, criminal power strategy.
A defector of Kim Jong-il’s rarefied inner circle reveals the desperate, despicable machinations of North Korea’s police state.
“North Korea’s opacity is its greatest strength,” writes New Focus International editor in chief Jin-sung in this powerful, heart-rending tale of one young man’s ability to infiltrate the locus of power, then escape. At age 28, in 1999, upon the publication of his ingratiating epic poem “Spring Rests on the Gun Barrel of the Lord,” written for Kim Jong-il, Jin-sung earned a personal endorsement of the Great Leader and the privilege of immunity as one of the few “Admitted” in the upper cadre of the Organization and Guidance Department of the Workers’ Party, which wielded the real power behind the leader. As one of the revered “court poets” and an employee of the United Front Department, which comprised the party’s intelligence and propaganda hub, the author had access to all kinds of South Korean literature in his work of “localization,” which attempted to influence South Korea by imitating its “ways of thought.” His elevation also proved his downfall, however, as he began questioning the party line fed to him. A trip home to the provincial town of Sariwon, vastly changed in the 10 years since he had last been there and reeling from the collapse of the economy, opened his eyes. The people were dropping dead from famine, so poor that they were selling water to wash one’s face and cotton comforters made painstakingly from the filters of cigarette butts, while Jin-sung, the party elite, habitually received foreign rations when they had none. Against the rules, the author loaned a South Korean biography of Kim Jong-il to his trusted friend, the composer Hwang Young-min, but the book got lost, forcing the two to go on the lam to China.
An exciting escape closes this urgent, well-rendered attempt to penetrate North Korea’s cynical, criminal power strategy.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6655-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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