The Sister
North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World
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4.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This first book on Kim Jong Un’s increasingly powerful sister, tapped to be his successor, offers jaw-dropping insights into the latest generation of North Korea’s secretive and murderous dynasty.
The first woman ever to issue the threat of a nuclear weapons strike is not even officially a head of state. Kim Yo Jong is the sister of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and, as their murderous regime’s chief propagandist, internal administrator, and foreign policymaker, she is the most powerful woman in North Korean history. Cruel but charming, she threatens and insults foreign leaders with sardonic wit, issuing proclamations and denunciations in her own name, a first for any woman in the Korean royal family. She memorably called the South Korean Defense Minister “a senseless and scum-like guy” before going on to promise South Korea “a miserable fate little short of total destruction and ruin”. A princess by birth with great expectations for her macabre kingdom, she was brought up to believe it is her mission to reunite North Korea with the South or die trying. She’s ruthless and incredibly dangerous.
The Sister, written by Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar of Korean and East Asian studies and a specialist on North Korea, is a fascinating, authoritative account of the mysterious world of North Korea and its ruling dynasty—a family whose lust for power entails the brutal repression of civilians, a missile program that can reach the continental US, and the constant threat of global havoc.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tufts University law professor Lee debuts with an informative if overwrought portrait of Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Lee contends that, even among her ruthless family, Yo Jong is uniquely sinister (as evidenced by her vitriolic anti-Western statements, made from her increasing positions of power within the government) and on the cusp of attaining even greater authority (evinced not only by her continued promotions and public appearances, but by reading between the lines of symbolic gestures made in official pageantry, including a procession wherein Yo Jong and her brother had the same dynastic insignia embroidered on their horses' decorative headgear). While Lee successfully makes his case for Yo Jong's signifiance (his theory that she is currently next in line for succession appears well-founded), as well as her worrying zealousness, the analysis is undermined by off-putting snark and flowery scaremongering ("men twice her age tremble and grovel before her") and uncritical repackaging of combative takes on North Korean history and current geopolitics. (Lee rehashes a propagandistic Cold War narrative that calls into question the WWII-era guerrilla fighter bona fides of Kim Il Sung, the dynasty's founder, and unpersuasively dismisses the idea that food shortages in contemporary North Korea are caused even in part by U.S. sanctions.) Readers looking for a measured take on the undeniably brutal regime will be left wanting.
