North Korean Memoirs

North Korean Memoirs PDF Author: Mark Treston
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595341438
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Memoirs written by 'David' about life in North Korea after his defection from the United States.

North Korean Memoirs

North Korean Memoirs PDF Author: Mark Treston
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595341438
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
Memoirs written by 'David' about life in North Korea after his defection from the United States.

North Korean Memoirs

North Korean Memoirs PDF Author: Mark D. Treston
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595789188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Journey into the life of a renegade American who decided to defect to the most reclusive and oppressive nation in modern history: North Korea. An American idealist defects to North Korea in the 1970's only to discover the true horrors of this Stalinist state. What happens next would shock even those familiar with authoritarian regimes. The author, an American Foreign Service worker in china, meets a man by the name of "David". David entrusts the author with his diary and makes the author promise him that the diary will be shown to the world as "evidence of what North Korea is really like". Following this encounter, the author never sees David again. The author discovers that within the pages of this diary lies an incredible story of defection, survival, and an eventual escape by the man he knows only as "David". After staying up and reading the entire diary, the author is convinced that David's story must be told to the world. The diary details David's life from his fairly comfortable upbringings, through his rebellious youth, and into his extraordinary decision to defect to North Korea. At first, David enjoys an elevated status in North Korea as a "hero" and a "patriot" of the socialist cause. During two decades as an English professor at the most prestigious North Korean University, David experiences love, seduction, betrayal, and violence.

The Girl in the Red Shoes

The Girl in the Red Shoes PDF Author: Hyeonseo Lee
Publisher: William Collins
ISBN: 9780007554850
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships and the story of one woman s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom. 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 to 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 ? Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family. She could not return, since rumours of her escape were spreading, and she and her family could incur the punishments of the government authorities involving imprisonment, torture, and possible public execution. Hyeonseo instead remained in China and rapidly learned Chinese in an effort to adapt and survive. Twelve years and two lifetimes later, she would return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea, on one of the most arduous, costly and dangerous journeys imaginable. This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life not once, but twice first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit."

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story PDF Author: Hyeonseo Lee
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007554869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

My Taiwan, Seoul, and Guadalajara (Mexico) Memoirs

My Taiwan, Seoul, and Guadalajara (Mexico) Memoirs PDF Author: Daniel Nardini
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1514424711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
My Taiwan, Seoul and Guadalajara (Mexico) Memoirs are a combined work of three separate memoirs. The first deals with his life in Taiwan, and his experiences there during an important part of the nations history. The second deals with the authors experiences and that of his Korean wifes family history with the city of Seoul. The third memoir is based on reports Mr. Nardini made on Guadalajara during his assignments for the newspaper Lawndale News.

Language and Truth in North Korea

Language and Truth in North Korea PDF Author: Sonia Ryang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824888715
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In this innovative and persuasive volume, Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse. It explores four discrete yet mutually related domains of discourse: North Korea’s literary purge of the 1950s–1960s; its state-initiated linguistic reforms of the 1960s–1980s; stories from a people’s chronicle, more than one hundred volumes in length, documenting interactions with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung; and the multivolume memoirs of the Great Leader himself, published in the 1990s. These texts are heterogeneous in terms of authorship, style, purpose, and genre, and many have never before been explored in Anglophone studies of North Korea. All have contributed to consolidating a North Korean regime of truth, bringing into existence a set of assumptions and shared understandings that have been regarded as true over the last half century. Basing her work on a study of these linguistic and discursive domains, Ryang explores the ways in which power, truth, and self are indissolubly connected by function as well as efficacy and how language plays a key role in sustaining their validity. The Kim Il Sung era, from 1945 to Kim’s death in 1994, forms the basis of the book, but the way truth emerged and was sustained during these decades provide important insight into how we can comprehend North Korea today. Rather than view the country as an ideological entity in order to expose its falsehood, so to speak, thinking critically about what it sees as true yields a far more productive outcome for scholarly analysis as well as general understanding. Language and Truth in North Korea will find a ready audience among those interested in North Korea from a wide variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, history, philosophy, and theology.

Nothing to Envy

Nothing to Envy PDF Author: Barbara Demick
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0385523912
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books) FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD WINNER OF WINNERS AWARD In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them. Praise for Nothing to Envy “Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times “Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”—The New York Review of Books “Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate “At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Every Falling Star

Every Falling Star PDF Author: Sungju Lee
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 161312340X
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Written for a young audience, this intense memoir explores the harsh realities of life on the streets in contemporary North Korea. Every Falling Star is the memoir of Sungju Lee, who at the age of twelve was forced to live on the streets of North Korea and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, “his brothers,” to daily be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. This riveting memoir allows young readers to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist.

Silent Life: Memoirs of a Writer

Silent Life: Memoirs of a Writer PDF Author: Chaman Nahal
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
ISBN: 9351940667
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
From the small town of Sialkot in pre-Partition Punjab, through the bustling streets of Delhi, to the scholarly environs of Cambridge and the bistros of Turin - Chaman Nahal walks us gently through his life. A life rich in literary scholarship and discipline, but equally in humour and a cynical eye capable of looking as critically at himself as at the follies and foibles of other human beings. If his 'Rules' for subjects as varied as writing a full-length book while coping with a fulltime job, fighting depression or even addiction to drink, bring a smile to one's lips, his achievements as writer, teacher and litterateur, often in the face of great odds, can only induce respect. Nahal's delightfully candid accounts of his encounters with Nirad Chaudhuri, the great Sir Vidia, Manohar Malgonkar and others; his diatribes against the tardiness and indiscipline that marks so much of 21st century India; and his frank appraisal of the trials and tribulations he has faced as an Indian writer in English, both at home and abroad, make this a memoir significant in today's literary context, as well as an absorbing cameo of an earlier time and place.

A Young Soldier's Memoirs: My One Year Growing Up in 1965 Korea

A Young Soldier's Memoirs: My One Year Growing Up in 1965 Korea PDF Author: Julio A. Martinez
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453523871
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The pages of this book vividly conjure up the sights and smells and sounds of Martinez’s adventures in Korea. He enthusiastically spent every free moment traveling everywhere, taking hundreds of photographs, teaching himself to speak, read, and write the language. Nothing escaped his youthful eyes, from ancient temples to rice planting and harvesting to little known facets of the country’s rich 5,000 year old culture. His exuberance with each of his discoveries is faithfully recorded, as are the familiar things we all felt—homesickness and fear, camaraderie and purpose. If you want to see the Korea of forty-five years ago through the bright eyes of a nineteen-year old soldier from Texas with a truly remarkable memory for every detail, this is the best way to do it.—William Roskey, Author of MUFFLED SHOTS: A Year on the DMZ