Told in simple prose, this is a shocking and devastating tale of a country’s utter contempt for its citizens.
A terrifying true story of life in North Korea.
Ishikawa was born in Japan in 1947 to a Korean father and Japanese mother. His father taught him that North Korea’s Kim Il sung was an “invincible general made of steel.” In 1958, the leader urged all Koreans to return home, proclaiming, “North Korea is a paradise on earth!” In 1960, Ishikawa and his family settled in the North Korean village of Dong Chong-ri as part of a mass repatriation campaign. Everyone had to join the Worker’s Party and pledge allegiance to Kim. The author learned in school that “thought was not free,” and no one could question the wisdom of Kim. He “played along” but knew he was now part of a “pseudo-religious cult.” Working on a farm as part of the Youth League, he learned that the sole cause of any failure was a total lack of respect for Kim and the party. Everyone was brainwashed. Despite being an excellent student, he was Japanese, the “lowest of the low,” and therefore condemned to the “very bottom of society.” As he notes, the farming process was “staggeringly crude and idiotic.” Food was taken away from them, and old people worked until they died. Poor workers went to concentration camps or were executed: “So many lives wasted.” After an arranged marriage, Ishikawa had a son in 1972. His mother died, and he carried her corpse on his back and buried her on a mountainside. His family suffered horribly, reduced to eating weeds and tree bark. It was even worse after Kim Jong il became leader. After 36 years and in utter despair, Ishikawa risked his life and, in darkness, crossed the Yalu River into China. He hoped to work in Japan and send money to his family, but by then, he was Korean, and the transition was extremely difficult.
Told in simple prose, this is a shocking and devastating tale of a country’s utter contempt for its citizens.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3690-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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