An insightful analysis of perhaps the world’s most dangerous dystopia.
The wild, improbable rise of Kim Jong Un.
Although Kim jokes are a media staple, readers will find none in this grim but expert assessment by Pak, former CIA analyst and currently senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In the prologue, the author, who studied in South Korea as a Fulbright scholar, reveals that North Korea’s existence owes much to Cold War politics. In 1945, Stalin installed Kim’s paternal grandfather, Kim Il Sung, in the northern half of the newly divided nation. A fierce nationalist and no puppet, he yearned to unite Korea and sent his army south in 1950. He did not expect the U.S. to intervene, which it did, and the 1953 armistice saw borders largely unchanged but North Korea devastated. With Russian and Chinese aid, he rebuilt, establishing a bizarre personality cult in which adjectives such as “Orwellian” or “Stalinist” barely scratch the surface. His clunky command economy went into free fall in the 1990s after the Soviet Union and its aid vanished. However, despite widespread famine, Kim and his successor son, Jong Il, devoted enormous resources to building an arsenal of nuclear bombs and missiles. Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011. His Swiss education and love of basketball suggested a cosmopolitan outlook, but this proved illusory as he brutally demonstrated his power on the international scene and executed family members. His pugnacious actions, including bomb and missile tests, provoked Donald Trump to threaten massive retaliation, but then Trump announced a personal meeting where his deal-making savvy would supposedly persuade Jong Un to abandon his arsenal in exchange for American largesse. As the author documents, three summits produced only platitudes, but more are in the works. Pak—but not Trump—realizes that nuclear arms have promoted Jong Un, leader of a tiny, impoverished nation, to a peer of the world’s superpowers, and he loves it.
An insightful analysis of perhaps the world’s most dangerous dystopia.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-1972-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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