Here are 99 books that The Orphan Master's Son fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a scholar of international human rights and comparative genocide studies. My father was a refugee from the Holocaust. So I was always interested in genocide, but I did not want to be another Holocaust scholar. Instead, I introduced one of the first university courses in Canada on comparative genocide studies. From a very young age, I was also very interested in social justice: I was seven when Emmett Till was murdered in the US. So when I became a professor, I decided to specialize in international human rights. I read a lot of “world literature” fiction that helps me to empathize with people in places I’ve never been.
North Korea is a combination of the Soviet Gulag and Auschwitz. Under the reign of the three Kims (grandfather, father, and son), North Koreans have endured malnourishment and starvation since the 1990s. Most of this would been avoidable if the government hadn’t had ridiculous economic policies forbidding private enterprise, and also imprisoned anyone who criticized the Kims’ rule.
Remick is a journalist who introduces North Korea to a general audience by interviewing six refugees. I “assigned” this book to one of my ladies’ book clubs and they found it very interesting and easy to read.
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)
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
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.
I’ve worked as a tugboat hand in Singapore and Peace Corps Volunteer in Polynesia. I’ve served on the editorial staffs of five newspapers, from a small-town daily in New Mexico to The New York Times. I’m also the authorof contemporary novels for young adults. Like the writers of these five great graphic novels, I choose themes that are important to me. Foremost are hope, healing, family, and friendship. These are themes I’d like my own children to embrace. Life can be hard, so as a writer I choose to send out that “ripple of hope” on the chance it may be heard or felt, and so make a difference.
The Canadian animator offers a revealing account of his two-month trip to North Korea to oversee a cartooning project. In deceptively simple words and drawings, Delisle gives us a front-row view of this complex, enigmatic totalitarian society. Everyday life in Pyongyang is rich fodder for this hilariously grumpy author. What’s it really like living in North Korea? Read this book and weep—and laugh.
Famously referred to as an "Axis-of-Evil" country, North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When the fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital of Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang…
I am a historian of international conflict who focuses on understanding the enemy. For most of my career, I have studied why we so often misread others, and how those misperceptions lead to war. The current crisis in Ukraine is just one more example of how the parties involved misunderstood each other. I believe that if we could improve this one ability, we would substantially lessen the likelihood, frequency, and severity of war.
Myers, a professor and North Korea watcher, draws on a careful reading of the “Hermit Kingdom’s” cultural products (its political speeches, novels, pamphlets, and more) to tease out a worldview that is too often opaque to outsiders. While escapee literature focuses on how average Koreans suffer under that brutal regime, this book affords us insight into how the regime sees itself – in ways that will surprise you.
Understanding North Korea through its propagandaA newly revised and updated edition that includes a consideration of Kim Jung Il's successor, Kim Jong-On What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? Here B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turnfrom the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity,…
My desire to learn about Korea was strong from an early age. When I was in elementary school in New Jersey, there was only one book about Korea in the local libraries. I remember this vividly since I borrowed it twenty times in a row. Though I was finally able to take courses on Korea in college, there was still much about Korea’s history that was frustratingly inaccessible to me because of the lack of books on the topic. I have devoted at least some of my work to producing books and other materials that will make it easier for younger generations to learn about Korean history.
This book is, quite simply, the best introduction to modern Korean history. Like other similar books, it covers the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, but it also has a helpful chapter that gives an overview of Korea’s premodern history.
What really sets this book apart is its carefully chosen insights on key aspects of modern history that give readers a deeper understanding of current events in Korea.
The book is a pleasure to read thanks to the author’s engaging writing style; it also provides an intellectual thrill because of the author’s questioning of Western assumptions about Korea as well as about the Cold War.
Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed against great powers during the Cold War, and divided and decimated by the Korean War, has recently seen the first real hints of reunification. But positive movements forward are tempered by frustrating steps backward. In the late 1990s South Korea survived its most severe economic crisis since the Korean War, forcing a successful restructuring of its political economy. Suffering through floods, droughts, and a famine that cost…
We teamed up about fifteen years ago around a common interest in the political economy of North Korea; Haggard is a political scientist, Noland an economist. Both of us had spent our careers focused on Asia but looking largely at the capitalist successes: Japan and the newly industrializing countries of Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. But what about the anomalous cases in the region that did not get on the growth train? The “Asian miracle” was hardly ubiquitous…what had gone wrong? North Korea was clearly the biggest puzzle, and we ended up researching and writing on the famine, refugees, and the complexities of international sanctions.
As a Russian, Lankov has a particular affinity for North Korea; he intuits how such economic systems work. A historian with some of the best work on the politics of the 1950s, he has more recently turned to projects interviewing refugees including on the economy of the North. He introduces the country’s weird political system, but also analyzes daily life, from personal status badges to schools, food and surviving in the underground market economy as well.
The Kim dynasty has ruled North Korea for over 60 years. Most of that period has found the country suffering under mature Stalinism characterized by manipulation, brutality and tight social control. Nevertheless, some citizens of Kim Jong Il's regime manage to transcend his tyranny in their daily existence. This book describes that difficult but determined existence and the world that the North Koreans have created for themselves in the face of oppression. Many features of this world are unique and even bizarre. But they have been created by the citizens to reflect their own ideas and values, in sharp contrast…
In The Ministry of Truth, I wanted to bring together two longstanding interests: dystopian fiction and the history of totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course a landmark work in both categories. In trying to explain how and why Orwell came to write his masterpiece, and its subsequent influence on fiction and political thought, I read a huge range of books that wrestled with the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism and asked how they were able to hold sway, physically and mentally, over tens of millions of people. Many of them are gripping and valuable but these five in particular make for great companions to 1984.
Čapek was a kind of Czech Orwell. Best known for his satirical science fiction — RUR gave us the word “robot”; War with the Newts is mindbogglingly inventive — he was also a prolific journalist who decried the rise of totalitarianism while celebrating ordinary lives. This anthology is the perfect introduction to his abundant wit, insight and compassion, with subjects ranging from the dishonesty of political language to the joy of gardening. A courageous anti-fascist, Čapek died of pneumonia in 1939, shortly before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and arrived at his door to arrest him.
Playful and provocative, irreverent and inspiring, Capek is perhaps the best-loved Czech writer of all time. Novelist and playwright, famed for inventing the word 'robot' in his play RUR, Capek was a vital part of the burgeoning artistic scene of Czechoslovakia of the 1920s and 30s. But it is in his journalism - his brief, sparky and delightful columns - that Capek can be found at his most succinct, direct and appealing.
This selection of Capek's writing, translated into English for the first time, contains his essential ideas. The pieces are animated by his passion for the ordinary and the…
In The Ministry of Truth, I wanted to bring together two longstanding interests: dystopian fiction and the history of totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course a landmark work in both categories. In trying to explain how and why Orwell came to write his masterpiece, and its subsequent influence on fiction and political thought, I read a huge range of books that wrestled with the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism and asked how they were able to hold sway, physically and mentally, over tens of millions of people. Many of them are gripping and valuable but these five in particular make for great companions to 1984.
The identity of “Murray Constantine” wasn’t uncovered until the 1980s, long after Burdekin’s death, but only a woman could have created such a persuasive patriarchal dystopia, half a century before The Handmaid’s Tale. Burdekin’s futuristic Nazi empire, a brutally misogynist quasi-religion, is dying slowly from within and an English airman named Alfred has been given explosive proof that Hitler was not in fact a Thor-like deity. Though the plot fizzles out, the ideas are extraordinarily ahead of their time.
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, Swastika Night projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”
I began writing speculative fiction because I was fascinated by its potential as a laboratory to imagine the world that could be. It’s a narrative form that allows us to play with revolutionary changes in society without any real people getting hurt. And it compels the author to do the hard work of imagining how others experience life in the real world as well as the imaginary one. The best SF novels balance their speculations with a grounding in the observed world, entertaining us with propulsive wonder while filling our minds with new ideas and fresh perspectives that linger long after we put the book down.
This masterpiece from one of the giants of mind-blowing SF is best known as a canonical example of alternate history: set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II, and the former U.S.A. is divided between occupying forces of Imperial Japan on the West Coast and Nazi Germany. As such, the conflict in the book is really about the underground resistance forces’ efforts against the occupiers.
Lots of writers have played with similar premises, but I love Dick’s the most because of its narrative daring, from using the I Ching as a device to generate plot to the Borgesian engine of the imaginary novel within the novel on which the story’s ultimate revelations turn.
'Dick's best work, and the most memorable alternative world tale...ever written' SCIENCE FICTION: THE 100 BEST NOVELS
It is 1962 and the Second World War has been over for seventeen years: people have now had a chance to adjust to the new order. But it's not been easy. The Mediterranean has been drained to make farmland, the population of Africa has virtually been wiped out and America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese. In the neutral buffer zone that divides the two superpowers lives the man in the high castle, the author of an underground bestseller, a…
Most of my public success has been as a novelist. My MFA, from the Iowa Writers Workshop, is in poetry. When I grow up, I want to be a short story writer. The dirty truth is, though, I’ve been making trouble with stories since I was a kid. During my first attempt in 10th grade, I wrote a story that got me suspended for two weeks. No explanation. No guidance. Just a conference between my parents, teachers, and principal (I wasn’t present), and they came out and banished me. I dropped out of school shortly after. I reckon that experience, both shameful and delicious, shaped my life and love of narrative.
The title alone sets the stage. This is meta at its most meta-ness. Who is narrating? Who is listening? Is the author complicit in the sometimes catastrophic, always deeply strange, events that unfold in these tiny tales? More importantly, do we the readers play a role? Less is more. Lesser still is even more more. The reach of suggestion. A knockout punch of inference.
The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corruption of the modern world, the dynamics of totalitarianism, and the interplay of reality and appearance.
In this stunning translation of The Voice Imitator, Bernhard gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes-some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay-this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories inevitably indict the sterility and callousness of modern life,…
I have a congenital heart disease in which I go into spontaneous cardiac arrest, and I am now 1% bionic (I have an ICD—defibrillator and pacemaker—implanted). Ever since waking up from that surgery, I’ve changed my perspective on what it means to live in the Venn Diagram overlap of “human” and “machine.” My heart—an organ at the heart of so many metaphors about love and emotion—is not like everyone else’s. It is connected to a battery to keep me alive. I write about what it means to be human to better understand myself.
As a librarian, I loved how books were deemed a threat in this work. Through fear-mongering and keeping people distracted by technology, people are imprisoned by ignorance without access to books. I particularly enjoyed the symbolism in the robotic murder dog—it can hunt down anyone and can find you anywhere.
Living under that level of technological threat searches for what it means to be human that much harder—but vital. But my favorite idea is that the knowledge we carry collectively has the power to save our humanity.
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
