Review by Booklist Review
Former BBC reporter Sweeney starts this explosive and entertaining inside look at North Korea by stating: North Korea is mad, bad, and dangerous to mock. But mock North Korea and the fat clown Kim Jong-un he does, simply by reporting on what he witnessed on a tour through this Orwellian land in 2013. Sweeney hit on a brilliant method for investigating the country: he posed as a history professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics in tow (the students were actual). They had guides who took them to different sites. By describing these sites including the mausoleum where two of North Korea's previous rulers are sumptuously buried; the creepy Pyongyang Planetarium; the Pyongyang Zoo, eerily devoid of snack kiosks or litter; and the chicken coop-like apartment complex he spotted while officially viewing a wealthy area Sweeney provides a remarkably vivid look at this hidden country. And he 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.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 laughse.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 elitethey had electricity, cars, Chinese roller skates, foreign delicacies, the ability to take trips to the zoo or circusand 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
