North Korea Undercover
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. It is Orwell’s 1984 made reality.
The regime controls the flow of information to its citizens, pouring relentless propaganda through omnipresent loud speakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line and the gulag awaits. State spies are everywhere, ready to punish disloyalty and the slightest sign of discontent.
You must bow to Kim Il Sung, the Eternal Leader and to his son, Generalissimo Kim Jong Il. Worship the dead and then hail the living, the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
North Koreans are told their home is the greatest nation on earth. Big Brother is always watching.
Posing as a university professor, award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney travelled undercover to gain unprecedented access to the world’s most secret state. Drawing on his own experiences and his extensive interviews with defectors and other key witnesses, North Korea Undercover pulls back the curtain, providing a rare insight into life there today, examining the country’s troubled history and addressing important questions about its uncertain future.
Sweeney’s highly engaging, authoritative account illuminates the dark side of the Hermit Kingdom and challenges the West’s perception of this paranoid nationalist state.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2013, BBC reporter Sweeney traveled to North Korea, posing as a university professor on an eight-day tour with a group from the London School of Economics. Drawing on surreptitiously captured footage, the official tour video, firsthand experiences, and interviews, he constructed a documentary for BBC Panorama. In this enlightening, often irreverent companion volume, he goes into further detail about his time in the isolated country and how it evolved into its current state. He begins by comparing the country to "a detective story where you stumble across a corpse in the library, a smoking gun beside it, and the corpse gets up and says that's no gun and it isn't smoking and this isn't a library." This analogy serves as an apt introduction to North Korea's bizarre contradictions, and particularly its seemingly brainwashed population. The book is an outsider's rare look into a mysterious and terrifying place ruled and ruined by three generations of tyrants, a land experiencing a "living death." One of Sweeney's primary contentions is that "Kim Jong Un's talk of nuclear war is a confidence trick... blinding us to a human rights tragedy on an immense scale." This account is shocking and unsettling, but also darkly entertaining.
