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North Korea Undercover
- Inside the World's Most Secret State
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
An authoritative and frightening investigation into the dark side of North Korean society
North Korea is like no other tyranny on Earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and Big Brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality.
Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea. Having entered the country undercover, Sweeny posed as a university professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics.
Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ - the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins - are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: One word out of line, and the gulag awaits. State spies are everywhere, ready to punish disloyalty at the slightest sign of discontent.
Drawing on his own experiences and his extensive interviews with defectors and other key witnesses, Sweeney's North Korea Undercover pulls back the curtain, providing a rare insight into life there today while examining the country's troubled history and addressing important questions about its uncertain future.
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In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4 changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4 by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square.
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great book and recording
- By Robert Peters on 06-14-16
By: Louisa Lim
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The Morning They Came for Us
- Dispatches from Syria
- By: Janine di Giovanni
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Doing for Syria what Imperial Life in the Emerald City did for the war in Iraq, The Morning They Came for Us bears witness to one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Drawing from years of experience covering Syria for Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and the front pages of the New York Times, award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni gives us a tour de force of war reportage, all told through the perspective of ordinary people.
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Bearing Witness to the Brutalities of War
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The Long Hangover
- Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past
- By: Shaun Walker
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.
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Fascinating and fair book on Putin's Russia
- By MyPublicName on 02-16-18
By: Shaun Walker
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Unreasonable Behaviour
- An Autobiography
- By: Don McCullin
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every conflict up to the Falklands War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. At the Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, McCullin’s photography made him a new kind of hero.
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Fantastic!
- By Dawn Schatzberg on 02-09-18
By: Don McCullin
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Symphony for the City of the Dead
- Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
- By: M. T. Anderson
- Narrated by: M. T. Anderson
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In September 1941, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history - almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943 - 1944. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens - the Leningrad Symphony.
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An Eye-Opening, Emotional Tale
- By A.L.R. on 02-05-16
By: M. T. Anderson
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From Beirut to Jerusalem
- By: Thomas L. Friedman
- Narrated by: Thomas L. Friedman
- Length: 3 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times and a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, has drawn on his decade in the Middle East to produce the most trenchant, vivid, and thought-provoking book yet on the region.
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This is an abridged version
- By Theodore on 03-31-14
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Children of the Night
- The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania
- By: Paul Kenyon
- Narrated by: Paul Kenyon
- Length: 19 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful king and his vivacious, British-born queen, the country oscillated wildly.
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Extremely interesting and well done
- By S. Harms on 11-13-23
By: Paul Kenyon
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Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
- The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
- By: Peter Pomerantsev
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
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Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of 21st-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship far subtler than 20th century strains, that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.
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Loved it!
- By Elle Kay on 11-25-16
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The Trigger
- Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
- By: Tim Butcher
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The Trigger tells the story of a young man who changed the world forever. It focuses on the drama of the incident itself by following Princip's journey. By retracing his steps from the feudal frontier village of his birth, through the mountains of the northern Balkans to the great plain city of Belgrade, and ultimately to Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our understanding of Princip and makes discoveries about him that have eluded historians for 100 years.
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Good, but not what I was looking for
- By Kendra on 07-08-14
By: Tim Butcher
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The Fear
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”
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Read at your own Risk!
- By Jim on 05-05-15
By: Peter Godwin
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HHhH
- By: Laurent Binet
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible-until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service-killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.
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Himlers Hirn heisst Heydrich
- By Darwin8u on 02-02-13
By: Laurent Binet
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Brothers of the Gun
- By: Marwan Hisham, Molly Crabapple
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
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In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends - fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq - joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm in arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent.
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Powerful memoir of Syrian war
- By Jennifer Friedman on 08-21-19
By: Marwan Hisham, and others
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The Church of Intimidation, Deviousness and Evil
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As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.
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Outstanding! A life-changing listen.
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A groundbreaking account of the rise of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—from his nuclear ambitions to his summits with President Donald J. Trump—by a leading American expert. From the beginning of Kim's reign, former CIA analyst Jung Pak has been at the forefront of shaping US policy on North Korea and providing strategic assessments for leadership at the highest levels in the government. Now, in this masterly book, she traces and explains Kim's ascent on the world stage.
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Derivative
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As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?
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Did not like narrator
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A Thousand Miles to Freedom
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Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child, Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the countrywide famine escalated. By the time she was 11 years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun too was in danger of starving. Finally her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister.
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Not Much New Here, but Courage and Hope to Spare
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The Reluctant Communist
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In January of 1965, 24-year-old US Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for 40 years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick).
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Live. Fight. Survive.
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Killer in the Kremlin
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In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes listeners from the heart of Putin's Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine. In a disturbing exposé of Putin's sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting—from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17—to understand the true extent of Putin's long war.
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Nothing new. Author has zero credibility
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By: John Sweeney
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A River in Darkness
- One Man's Escape from North Korea
- By: Masaji Ishikawa, Risa Kobayashi - translator, Martin Brown - translator
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Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.
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Awful! And I don't mean the book . . .
- By DJW on 01-03-18
By: Masaji Ishikawa, and others
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Act of War
- Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo
- By: Jack Cheevers
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- Unabridged
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In 1968, a small, dilapidated American spy ship set out on a dangerous mission to pinpoint military radar stations along the coast of North Korea. Packed with advanced surveillance equipment and classified intelligence documents, the USS Pueblo was poorly armed and lacked backup by air or sea. Its crew, led by a charismatic, hard-drinking, ex-submarine officer named Pete Bucher, was made up mostly of untested sailors in their teens and twenties.
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Mesmerizing book
- By Jean on 09-18-14
By: Jack Cheevers
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In Order to Live
- A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
- By: Yeonmi Park
- Narrated by: Eji Kim
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In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea - and to freedom.
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Wow. What a story!
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Kissinger
- A Biography
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 34 hrs and 30 mins
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Story
By the time Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had become, according to a Gallup poll, the most admired person in America and one of the most unlikely celebrities ever to capture the world’s imagination. Yet Kissinger was also reviled by large segments of the American public, ranging from liberal intellectuals to conservative activists. Kissinger explores the relationship between this complex man's personality and the foreign policy he pursued.
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A dissapointment
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By: Walter Isaacson
What listeners say about North Korea Undercover
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kevin Stokes
- 09-09-15
Highly listenable, humorous and enlightening
For many years I've heard odd news from North Korea. I was curious enough to examine North Korea vs South Korea on google maps and was amazed at the differences. Clearly North Korea seemed like it was a bit crazy so I wanted learn what made it tick.
The author travels through North Korea as part of a tour, escorted always by the two government appointed handlers. In between humorous interludes as things don't always make the impression that the handlers intend, Sweeney goes into history and information to other sources to explain the odd behavior of the people. In particular, by the end of the book I finally understood that the government has actually accomplished an amazing feat. They have used specific techniques to make the people actually and truly love the rulers which kill them and starve them while living an opulent lifestyle themselves. And this isn't just that the people have learned to pretend. They actually feel deep affection, and even those that escape across the border have trouble shedding their deep beliefs.
I also learned that they feel that the USA is their biggest enemy, and that fantasizing about killing our soldiers and defeating us in battle is a great source of entertainment for them. This seemed odd to me, since I don't think Americans think much about North Korea at all. Sweeney does a great job of why this is.
Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. Sweeney has a snarky wit, and compassion for the people who are caught up in the insanity.
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- Tintin
- 05-13-16
Smart but snarky
North Korea is hideous I know and wanted to look closer. This is a smart book with lots of information; the author did his research and also gives his own impressions of what saw there -- who he talked to, what he learned and an awful lot about what he thought about it.
There were two big detectors though, one was the amazingly slow narration, I do believe it was altered down because I listened at 1.7x and was fine. Second, the author seems mean spirited, which is also impressive because he's talking about North Korea after all and so quite a lot of derision is almost expected. But about every sentence had a witty slash in it, that's tiresome. About any random sentence might get him killed there, or worse.
He's a smart investigative journalist who has taken Scientology to task, and North Korea is an even harder nut to crack. He smashed it. So ... I recommend it, but this reading is slow and the text is bitter.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Gillian
- 06-29-16
Oh, the Horrors You'll Find Humorous...
Seriously, there are a lot of things in "North Korea Undercover" that are sheer tragedy, but in the hands of John Sweeney, they're actually hilarious.
There's nothing funny about executions... until there is. Nothing funny about mass unemployment and underdevelopment... until there is. I guess what saves this book from being offensive is that it's so darned enlightening.
I got into North Korea whilst doing research and quickly became quite a rabid fan of N. Korean nonfiction, having ten audiobooks alone on the subject. If you've done the defector books, and if you've done (or prefer not to do, as it's a bit academic:) "Nothing to Envy" (which you can find here on Audible), "Undercover" is for you. It's an incredibly wry look at what it means to be North Korean, especially of the "middle-class." The stores with nothing to sell, the hospitals that have no medicine but will somehow cure you before noon, the factories that have no employees and produce nothing, the sporadic electricity, and ESPECIALLY the constant, looming threat of war with America.
It's hilarious, especially when Sweeney pushes the envelope and ruffles the feathers of the group's handlers, true-believers or just-trying-to-get-along types.
There's plenty of history here too about the Kims. It's horrifying, yet somehow also written in an almost affectionate style as an homage to how the general population gets along. There's a trip to the zoo... then information about the camps. There's splashing around in waterfalls... then sightings of poverty beyond the imagination.
Sometimes the text does indeed slow down, but Gildart Jackson is a fine narrator, and you'll find yourself chuckling despite the fact that your mind was just about ready to wander.
A fine book, just coulda used some minor editing.
And please. If you do insist on splashing in North Korea's waterfalls? Wear underpants without holes. Your minders will really appreciate it.
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12 people found this helpful
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- jonathan meharg
- 05-10-16
Sad and shocking.
This is one of the best books about North Korea I've ever read. It was very informative and at times very funny. This is one of the more eye opening books I've ever read. The narrator does an amazing job also.
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11 people found this helpful
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- John S.
- 03-15-16
Mixed bag
Author's travel narrative style rivals that of Bill Bryson. Unfortunately, the excellent narration didn't prevent me from losing interest regularly during the journalistic (second-hand) reports of conditions there.
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- Professormom
- 03-02-16
Riveting account is bizarre reality!
A riveting account of bizarre land trapped under the most opaque of dictatorships. The author (and narrator) succeed with a tone that is both humorous and heartbreaking. Wry descriptions of the authors own strange visit are entertaining and balance the tales of suffering and cruelty that are the status quo in North Korea.
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- gandalf
- 12-19-15
Hmm.
Nothing wrong with the narration. But the author lost me as soon as he began lauding "Team America" and "The Interview" as valid critical analyses of North Korea. Gross, it's 2015, get with it.
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- Tim
- 07-07-16
Pigs Flew and North Korea Froze
There is something wrong with this book. I'm not sure it's the reporter style of journalism from John Sweeney or the reader from Gildart Jackson, but "North Korea Underground" almost feels like reading a half paragraph article at the grocery store with lots of pictures of famine. The way that the information was presented, it almost felt arrogant and cocky, like the author had a chip on his shoulder to disapprove North Korea before entering the regime.
There is not really a first person perspective on what is like to live under a dictatorship. Almost all of the examples and events are from other publications that are well documented from the past. Everything is from the eye of the author. and other sources. The human interest is almost non existing in this book. It doesn't question the author's abilities because North Korea still freezing over and pigs are flying, but it questions the motives from Sweeney.
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- richard
- 09-23-15
Great book
It's funny and interesting to hear from someone else who has been to the same factory's and hotels etc that I visited on my trip
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- Count B
- 07-25-16
THERE ARE MUCH BETTER ON NORTH KOREA
Any additional comments?
John Sweeny is a great journalist & is a pretty good overview book but lacks depth. I have many books on North Korea & those are written by defectors, some very high level ex government officials. They give a much better insight to daily life, where as this book is more outside looking in as he really only went on the standard tour any person can take. So is full of what one can learn from the internet. Interesting for beginners in the subject, but there are much better books.
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