North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula: A Modern History

by Paul French

North Korea remains one of the least understood nations on earth; a nuclear enabled "Hermit Kingdom" ravaged by economic mismanagement and reliant on illegal weapons sales, smuggling and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1842774735
• ISBN13: 9781842774731
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Zed Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An Important Dispassionate Work on a Highly Emotive Subject

Mr. French has done us all a great service by writing a dispassionate analysis of recent history in the DPRK. Few places in the world bear witness to the intersection of so many disparate national interests and international concerns. The complexity of the subject is often obscured by emotive reporting that rehashes the prevailing neo-Con world view. As Mr. French clearly demonstrates throughout his well written book, any of the few remaining misguided apologists for the Pyongyang regime have no factual standing for their views. However, the "demonization" of Kim Jong Il and his regime has simply worked to paint the Bush administration into a corner by removing any flexibility in its dealings with Pyongyang. The DPRK has survived against the odds for more than 60 years and has acquired a new lease on life through its ham-fisted entry into the nuclear club. This fact is something that will not change no matter how much anger and alarm the White House and the Western media can generate. It is not a question of doing something reactively in a knee-jerk manner, which seems to be the order of the day. Now is the time for dispassionate analysis to find a way to break through the diplomatic log-jam that has kept the Korean peninsula in suspension since 1953. This requires the emotional reserve to understand how the DPRK sees the threats posed by the post-WWII world. Mr. French's book is worth the price of admission for the knowledge that it conveys to the reader on that score. It seems to me that other reviewers have overstated the shortcomings of Mr. French's book. Certainly someone who is serious about understanding the dilemma on the Korean peninsula will need to go through the entire literature available on this topic and sort through a wide range of views. While Mr. French's book is one of many that are mandatory reading, it is, admittedly, not a complete view (as if there is such a book on any subject). I have only given his book four stars because of my pedantic bias for research in local language materials. However, while Mr. French's book is based on non-Korean language sources, this does not detract in the least from its usefulness.