See You Again in Pyongyang

Author: Travis Jeppesen
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316509132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Book Description
A "close-up look at the cloistered country" (USA Today), See You Again in Pyongyang is American writer Travis Jeppesen's "probing" and "artful" (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of his travels in North Korea--an eye-opening portrait that goes behind the headlines about Trump and Kim, revealing North Koreans' "entrepreneurial spirit, and hidden love of foreign media, as well as their dreams and fears" (Los Angeles Times). In See You Again in Pyongyang, Travis Jeppesen, the first American to complete a university program in North Korea, culls from his experiences living, traveling, and studying in the country to create a multifaceted portrait of the country and its idiosyncratic capital city in the Kim Jong Un Era. Anchored by the experience of his five trips to North Korea and his interactions with citizens from all walks of life, Jeppesen takes readers behind the propaganda, showing how the North Korean system actually works in daily life. He challenges the notion that Pyongyang is merely a "showcase capital" where everything is staged for the benefit of foreigners, as well as the idea that Pyongyangites are brainwashed robots. Jeppesen introduces readers to an array of fascinating North Koreans, from government ministers with a side hustle in black market Western products to young people enamored with American pop culture. With unique personal insight and a rigorous historical grounding, Jeppesen goes beyond the media cliches, showing North Koreans in their full complexity. See You Again in Pyongyang is an essential addition to the literature about one of the world's most fascinating and mysterious places.

Model City

Author: Cristiano Bianchi
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262043335
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A photographic journey through the architecture of North Korea's “model” utopia. The story of Pyongyang is unique even in the annals of model cities and modernist utopias. Entirely rebuilt after the Korean War, North Korea's capital city was planned and fully implemented to embody a single ideological vision. This extraordinary, richly illustrated book takes readers on a photographic journey through the architecture of North Korea's “model” utopia. Built as an ideological guide for its citizens, Pyongyang displays a unique architectural cohesion and narrative. From the city's large-scale monumental axes to its symbolic sports halls and experimental housing, Model City offers offers comprehensive visual access to Pyongyang's restricted buildings. The architecture of Pyongyang exists within a culture that favors construction and renewal over historical preservation, and in recent years many buildings have been redeveloped to remove interior features or render facades unrecognizable. Often kitschy, colorful, and dramatic, Pyongyang's architecture makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and theater. As befits a culture that has carefully crafted its own narrative, the backdrop of each photograph in Model City has been replaced with a color gradient, evoking the pastel skies of North Korea's propaganda posters. Model City features two hundred color illustrations of buildings rarely seen by non-North Koreans, diagrams and architectural drawings that reveal the planning behind the city's elaborate symbolism, and texts by experts on Korean architecture—including an excerpt from On Architecture by Kim Jong-Il, father of the current leader Kim Jong-un. The authors' research has been supported by Koryo Studio and Korea Cities Federation.

Pyongyang

Author: Guy Delisle
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770461868
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
The perennial graphic novel about the "Hermit Country" with new cover and introduction by Gore Verbinski Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea is Guy Delisle's graphic novel that made his career,an international bestseller for over ten years. Delisle became one of the few Westerners to be allowed access to the fortresslike country when he was working in animation for a French company. While living in the nation's capital for two months on a work visa, Delisle observed everything he was allowed to see of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered, bringing a sardonic and skeptical perspective on a place rife with propaganda. As a guide to the country, Delisle is a non-believer with a keen eye for the humor and tragedy of dictatorial whims, expressed in looming architecture and tiny, omnipresent photos of the President. The absurd vagaries of everyday life become fodder for a frustrated animator’s musings as boredom and censorship sink in. Delisle himself is the ideal foil for North Korean spin, the grumpy outsider who brought a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 with him into the totalitarian nation. Pyongyang is an informative, personal, and accessible look at a dangerous and enigmatic country. Pyongyang has been translated from the French by Helge Dascher. Dascher has been translating graphic novels from French and German to English for over twenty years. A contributor to Drawn & Quarterly since the early days, her translations include acclaimed titles such as the Aya series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, Hostage by Guy Delisle, and Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët. With a background in art history and history, she also translates books and exhibitions for museums in North America and Europe. She lives in Montreal.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang

Author: Marcel Theroux
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 166800268X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
The acclaimed author of the “sublime” (The New York Times) Far North, a finalist for the National Book Award, returns with a mesmerizing novel about a North Korean boy whose life is irrevocably changed when he stumbles across a mysterious Western book—a guide to Dungeons & Dragons. Ten-year-old Jun-su is a bright and obedient boy whose only desire is to be a credit to his family, his nation, and most importantly, his Dear Leader. However, when he discovers a copy of The Dungeon Master’s Guide, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor, a new and colorful world opens up to him. With the help of an English-speaking teacher, Jun-su deciphers the rules of the famous role-playing game and his imaginary adventures sweep him away from the harsh reality of a famine-stricken North Korea. Over time, the game leads Jun-su on a spellbinding and unexpected journey through the hidden layers of his country, toward precocious success, glory, love, betrayal, prison, a spell at the pinnacle of the North Korean elite, and an extraordinary kind of redemption. A vivid, uplifting, and deeply researched novel, The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is a love story and a tale of survival against the odds. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees and drawing on the author’s personal experience of North Korea, it explores the power of empathy and imagination in a society where they are dangerous liabilities.

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader

Author: Benjamin R. Young
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Far from always having been an isolated nation and a pariah state in the international community, North Korea exercised significant influence among Third World nations during the Cold War era. With one foot in the socialist Second World and the other in the anticolonial Third World, North Korea occupied a unique position as both a postcolonial nation and a Soviet client state, and sent advisors to assist African liberation movements, trained anti-imperialist guerilla fighters, and completed building projects in developing countries. State-run media coverage of events in the Third World shaped the worldview of many North Koreans and helped them imagine a unified anti-imperialist front that stretched from the boulevards of Pyongyang to the streets of the Gaza Strip and the beaches of Cuba. This book tells the story of North Korea's transformation in the Third World from model developmental state to reckless terrorist nation, and how Pyongyang's actions, both in the Third World and on the Korean peninsula, ultimately backfired against the Kim family regime's foreign policy goals. Based on multinational and multi-archival research, this book examines the intersection of North Korea's domestic and foreign policies and the ways in which North Korea's developmental model appealed to the decolonizing world.

Pyongyang

Author: Chris Springer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Part history book, part travel guide of the North Korean capital, this volume combines color photographs with 140 entries detailing the history and uses of various sites of the city (including a number that proclaim "exact location unknown"), from museums, art galleries, and government buildings to ancient tombs and geological features. The entries are preceded by a brief history of North Korea and Pyongyang. Distributed by Saranda Books. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Chol-hwan Kang
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465011047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history.

The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

Author: Charles K. Armstrong
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions. Armstrong's account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author's argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.

Welcome to Pyongyang

Author: Charlie Crane
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781905712045
Category : Architectural photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Charlie Crane's large-format photographs of Pyongyang, the capital city of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, were taken on three visits between 2005 and 2006. His landscapes and portraits are presented here in the manner of a guidebook, with an introduction by Crane's collaborator and producer, Nicholas Bonner, and with commentaries on the scenes depicted from interviews recorded with the city's official tourist guides.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Author: Kang Chol-Hwan
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
ISBN: 0857895389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
'I beseech you to read this account' - Christopher Hitchens A magnificent, harrowing testimony to the voiceless victims of North Korea. Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of a North Korean concentration camp to escape the 'hermit kingdom' and tell his story to the world. This memoir reveals the human suffering in his camp, with its forced labour, frequent public executions and near-starvation rations. Kang eventually escaped to South Korea via China to give testimony to the hardships and atrocities that constitute the lives of the thousands of people still detained in the gulags today. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this story of one young man's personal suffering finally gives eye-witness proof to this neglected chapter of modern history.