North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State

by John Sweeney Narrated by Gildart Jackson

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

The Times

Sweeney's book is a spark in the dark of North Korea.

Sunday Business Post

Harrowing...creepy and poignant; and, in turn, tragic and obscene. North Korea Undercover asserts that the West should be more concerned about labour camps than nuclear weapons.

Booklist

An explosive and entertaining inside look at North Korea. Sweeney spins off from the physical places into zany yet tragic stories about North Korea’s rulers and the bizarre complacency of the country’s people. An investigative must-read.

Solidarity

This is a chilling book, but a timely one, written with both humour and compassion. Buy it, read it, and discuss it.

Literary Review

The recent UN report on North Korea underlined the importance of Sweeney's book. There is much to learn from North Korea Undercover.

Booklist

An explosive and entertaining inside look at North Korea. Sweeney spins off from the physical places into zany yet tragic stories about North Korea’s rulers and the bizarre complacency of the country’s people. An investigative must-read.

The Times

Sweeney's book is a spark in the dark of North Korea.

Library Journal

06/01/2015
Award-winning author, journalist, and BBC documentarian Sweeney reports on his eight-day trip to North Korea while posing as a London School of Economics student. This is the print account of Sweeney's 2013 documentary, which aired on the BBC show Panorama. His impressions of the country—an oppressive, extremely isolated, and very poor nation controlled by the evil, dictatorial Kim dynasty—will be no surprise to anyone at all familiar with it. He argues that the regime could collapse "in forty months." Sweeney finds North Korea's seclusion, its stratified social structure, and its dominance by the successive Kim family dictators the natural product of Korea's mountainous geography, its Confucian past, and its historical development. Based on short visits to the region, research, and interviews with a few North Korean defectors (all several years in the past), this book is neither a scholarly study, nor one that reveals the country's latest developments. VERDICT Of interest only to those looking to add to their shelves another account of North Korea.—Mark Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati

Kirkus Reviews

2015-04-01
The mocking account of an English investigative journalist's undercover visit to North Korea underscores the fact that the dire state is no laughing matter. Embedded with a group of London School of Economics students in 2013 on an official guided tour to Pyongyang, the author was fired from the BBC after the dust-up over his subsequent documentary for BBC Panorama, North Korea Undercover. Sweeney has previously taken on some of the evil forces of corruption and power without flinching (The Church of Fear: The Weird World of Scientology, 2013, etc.). In this account of his strange and troubling visit inside North Korea, on and off the tourist bus, minded at every step by Mr. Hyun and the more sunny Miss Jun, Sweeney doesn't even have to try too hard for laughs—e.g., his chronicle of the first day's stop at the mausoleum housing the open viewing of the country's first two tyrants, Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. ("How can you satirize this?" Sweeney muses.) Most glaring for the author was the enormous chasm between the very few elite—they had electricity, cars, Chinese roller skates, foreign delicacies, the ability to take trips to the zoo or circus—and the rest of the 23 million oppressed masses struggling to survive with inadequate food and appalling living conditions. The "robotization" of the totalitarian message has been relentless and all-encompassing. There are statues of the dictators everywhere, widespread denial that the North was the instigator of the Korean War, and a complete lack of acknowledgement of the horrific famine of the late 1990s. Within the frame of the visit, Sweeney delves into reports of those who visited and witnessed the dictatorships before him, from Ceausescu's translator to IRA bomb-makers to gulag prisoners to defectors. In a carefully footnoted and documented work, Sweeney has done his homework, though the snide tone grates.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169810059
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	07/15/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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