Category: Books & Films

The time stamp on this post may be the most telling part of it, for I first got my hands on Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform” back in late March.  The intervening months have been very busy for me, and the book raised more points of discussion than I can cover here.  Noland and Haggard  are two of the finest, most respected scholars of all things North Korean and economic, and their...

Until now, my main reference has been Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” because Natsios’s personal experience inside North Korea added so much to his observations, but Noland is almost in his own category  for sheer quality and rigor of research.  Noland is also the outlier for the low numbers he cites for the death toll from the famine — 600,000 to 1 million, as opposed to 2 to 2.5 million — and I’ve always wanted to know how...