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
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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