North Korea Undercover

April 20, 2015
In 2013, BBC reporter Sweeney traveled to North Korea, posing as a university professor on an eight-day tour with a group from the London School of Economics. Drawing on surreptitiously captured footage, the official tour video, firsthand experiences, and interviews, he constructed a documentary for BBC Panorama. In this enlightening, often irreverent companion volume, he goes into further detail about his time in the isolated country and how it evolved into its current state. He begins by comparing the country to “a detective story where you stumble across a corpse in the library, a smoking gun beside it, and the corpse gets up and says that’s no gun and it isn’t smoking and this isn’t a library.” This analogy serves as an apt introduction to North Korea’s bizarre contradictions, and particularly its seemingly brainwashed population. The book is an outsider’s rare look into a mysterious and terrifying place ruled and ruined by three generations of tyrants, a land experiencing a “living death.” One of Sweeney’s primary contentions is that “Kim Jong Un’s talk of nuclear war is a confidence trick... blinding us to a human rights tragedy on an immense scale.” This account is shocking and unsettling, but also darkly entertaining. Agent: Humfrey Hunter, Hunter Profiles.

June 1, 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

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