In
this rare insider’s view into contemporary North Korea, a high-ranking
counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim
Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom.
“The general
will now enter the room.”
Everyone turns
to stone. Not moving my head, I direct my eyes to a point halfway up the
archway where Kim Jong-il’s face will soon appear…
As
North Korea’s state poet laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food
provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel
pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il
himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged
existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent
to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.
Never
before has a member of the elite described the inner workings of this
totalitarian state and its propaganda machine. An astonishing exposé told
through the heart-stopping story of Jang Jin-sung’s escape to South Korea, Dear
Leader is a rare and unprecedented insight into the world’s most secretive
and repressive regime.
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“A North Korean defector finds fleeing the Kim dictatorship as nightmarish as living under it in this harrowing memoir…Much of the book is a thriller-like narrative of Jang’s 2004 escape
into the netherworld of illegal North Korean refugees in China, where he
drifts, penniless and hunted by the police, through the glittering
wealth and hard-edged anomie of modern Chinese cities, dependent on the
kindness of random strangers. Jang’s almost impossibly dramatic story is
one of the best depictions yet of North Korea’s nightmare.”
—
Publishers Weekly