A candid and disturbing portrait of life under a dictatorship.
An American’s travels in North Korea.
Jeppesen, an American novelist (The Suiciders, 2013, etc.) and art critic who lives in Berlin, earned a doctorate in London and set off in 2016 to learn the Korean language at Kim Hyong Jik University in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. A self-described wanderer drawn to “the seemingly incomprehensible,” he has made his study trip (and several earlier visits) the basis for this first-person account of life in a “multifaceted, misunderstood, and unsummarizable” nation. The author read and traveled widely enough (to festivals, revolutionary sites, etc.) to understand that “paranoia and suspicion” are omnipresent in the police state, finding himself “alternately charmed, intrigued, disgusted, amused, terrified—often all of these at once.” North Koreans are heavily monitored. (Jeppesen complains that he spent little time alone.) They are forbidden to speak or move freely, travel abroad, or watch foreign media. Amid the oppression of their lives in a poor country, the author was struck by the “humanity” and “sweetness” of ordinary people encountered in shops, museums, and elsewhere. Language barriers and Korean shyness often prevented interactions. Also, the “ultra-nationalist ideology” of posters, murals, mosaics, and the ever present patriotic music of the Moranbong Band (its 20 female members hand-picked by Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un), combined with present-day state denunciation of “American bastards” and a brutal 35-year occupation by Japan (1910-1945), has fostered strong suspicion of foreigners. The author’s account of his visit to the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, with its “outlandish” claims of American brutality in the Korean War, will rattle many readers. Jeppesen insists the propaganda works both ways, with the U.S. decrying “the axis of evil” and enforcing an “unwritten rule” against positive news coverage of North Korea. Unfortunately, the author’s constant “rendering” of information through dialogue with his travel companions adds little to the narrative. He finds “a great diversity of opinion unvoiced, unvoicable” and even small signs of resistance by individual artists.
A candid and disturbing portrait of life under a dictatorship.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-50915-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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