(pp. 25-26)
Hard facts and first-hand reporting are hard to come by in a country as notoriously secretive and repressive as North Korea, but Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004) provides plenty of both. Drawing on twenty-five years of reporting, including multiple visits to the DPRK, Martin’s fat volume is probably the most detailed book on the terrifying and sometimes surreal inner workings of North Korea.
Jasper Becker relies on extensive interviews with North Korean exiles for his Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. In it, Becker paints the picture of an evil slave state run by a “Marxist Sun King” and warns that there will be political and humanitarian consequences if we ignore the North Korean threat.
In The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag (Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, New York: Basic Books, 2001) Kang Chol-hwan tells the story of his decade-long imprisonment in a North Korean prison.
For readers more interested in North Korean food than the country’s particular flavour of political repression, The Axis of Evil Cookbook (published in the online political magazine the nth position) has recipes for a few North Korean dishes, as well a mean Iraqi Aubergine Fritter.
“Sea-Crossed Lovers”
Yigal Schleifer
(pp. 26-28)
Fans of Yabanci Damat can find wallpaper and screensavers, photos of cast members, and a lively message board at the television show’s official fan site, available in Turkish or English. If you think you might want to join the fan ranks, sample the show online through Jumptv.
Yabanci Damat isn’t the only discussion of Turkish-Greek relations onscreen. Yesim Ustaoglu’s Bulutlari Beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds, Turkey, 2004) tells the story of a Greek woman left behind during the 1916 expulsion of Pontus Greeks and raised by a Turkish family. In the documentary Paralel Yolculuklar (Parallel Trips, 2004), Greek director Panicos Chrysanthou and Turkish director Dervis Zaim wade into the morass of Cypriot politics. Chysanthou and Zain take a close and sympathetic look at those affected by the conflict in 1974, from widows to veterans.
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