Category: Books & Films

I don’t think Mr. Jang, who presented his book to me with his own hands, would mind me posting a few passages. In this one, Jang relates how, after his unlikely rise from small-town boy to court poet, he went back to his home town of Sariwon in 1994, during the Great Famine, and saw how it had transformed the town and everyone he knew. After a meager meal of rice that his hosts has saved, grain by grain, for weeks,...

On this site, I have followed the rise of a dissident culture among North Korean emigres, including poet, author, and public intellectual Jang Jin-Sung; artist Sun Mu; poet Lee Kay-Yeon; and playwright Jung Sung San. If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area, you have a chance to see “Winter Butterfly,” the work of film director Kim Gyu-min, based on his experiences in North Hamgyeong Province, North Korea, tonight. Kim is one of a small number of North Korean emigre film directors active in South Korea....

Does The Interview trivialize the suffering of North Koreans?  I’m not sure what you had a right to expect from the likes of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I’d say it did so less than I expected. A central theme of the film’s climactic scene — Franco’s interview with Kim Jong Un — was hunger, and the contrast between Kim’s obscene wealth and the squalor of his people. Was The Interview a good parody of North Korea? It was a...

Terry’s review isn’t what I’d call favorable, and Terry is a much kinder soul than I am, but it seems too kind to call Hill “one of the most successful diplomats of his generation.” Sure, Hill was one of his generation’s most successful careerists, but as a diplomat, he may have been the greatest human wrecking ball in modern American diplomacy. What I’m really waiting for is a critical appraisal of Hill’s IKEA writing style.