(Part 2) Best north korean history books according to redditors

This book, it's amazing. Rather than people speculating about what goes on there, it's full of actual stories from actual people there. Some of it is just unbelievable. They live in a fantasy world, except that fantasy implies something fantastic.

Also, this documentary is fascinating:

"Inside Undercover In North Korea" (5 parts)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_268_pBvPs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0t9fztpsOY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAipMzjaHzA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDR7j0sqYjA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4puhfLTzdc

Joseon era:

• A Review of Korean History, Vol.2: Joseon Era; Woo, Han Young (2010)
  
• Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 1: From Early Times Through the 16th Century (Introduction to Asian Civilizations); Lee, Peter H. (ed) (1996)
  
• Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries; Lee, Peter H. (ed) (1996)
  
  I prefer the 'Review' more, but it might come across as a little dry. I feel that it does a fair job of discussing a number of topics related to the creation and running of the Joseon Dynasty, breaking the dynasty up into smaller components and then focusing on some areas (arts, military, cultural practices) within those smaller time frames. 'Sources' for me came across as more academic than 'Review' but you might enjoy it more. 'Sources' includes translations of primary sources, which is helpful, while 'Review' includes images such as paintings and maps.
  
  General:
  
  
• Korea Unmasked: In Search of the Country, the Society and the People; Rhie Won-bok (2005)
  
  A comic book that goes into the 'making' of Korea and Korean culture. I have some reservations about this one but if you don't take it too seriously it can be a fun and easy way to get introduced to a number of topics related to Korea.
  
  'Modern' Korea:
  
  
• The Dawn of Modern Korea; Lankov, Andrei (2007)
  
• Korea Through Western Eyes, Book, Written in English; Neff, Robert (2009)
  
• The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History; Oberdorfer, Don (2013)
  
• Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History; Cummings, Bruce (2005)
  
• The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies; Breen, Michael (2014)
  
• Korea And Her Neighbours...; Bird, Isabella (2011; original 1897)
  
  Lankov's book is a collection of newspaper articles he wrote entertaining subjects like the story of Korea's first automobiles, the introduction of the first telephones, etc. Easy to digest and they offer a glimpse of what society was like at each point in time; not a 'serious' book on Korean history, though. Neff's book was a chore to get through and it felt like no editing had gone into the book before publishing. If I'm not mistaken this also started out as a series of articles for one of the local newspapers; the transition from article to book did not go quite as well.
  
  It's probably been 10 years since I read the books from Breen, Oberdorfer and Cummings, which makes it a little difficult to write a lot about them. Cummings I know gets criticized for being pro-North Korea in his writing, so that's something to keep in mind, while Oberdorfer I think was a correspondent living in Korea so may have a more 'eyewitness' approach to some of the events. Bird's book is a description of her travels in Korea during the Joseon period and I remember it being an interesting read. Not a balanced historical account by any means - and it obviously suffers from being written from an outside perspective at a time when ethnocentrism was more prevalent - but it may be an alternative to consider. You should be able to find a .pdf copy of that one online.
  
  
• Fifteen Years Among The Top-Knots: Or Life In Korea; Underwood, Lillias H. (2007, original 1904)
  
  Haven't read this one, but I've seen others mention it in the past. It's another first-person account from Korea at the cusp of the 20th century, this time from the perspective of a medical missionary. Again, not an objective history book, but if you prefer first-person narratives it may at least be worth a look. A .pdf copy has been published online, this one by the University of Oregon.
  
  Edit: One I forgot to mention, but which I've also heard is used in some English-language classes on Korean history/studies:
  
  
• Korea Old and New: A History; Eckert, Carter J. (1991) (I just noticed this is also mentioned by seaturtles7777)

It's not a cut and dry, one thing or another issue. I am talking about why North Korea has had famine issues over the last half century.

I really recommend reading Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, which goes into depth about the formation of North Korea, why it was founded, why Kim Il Sung came to power, and in depth history about North Korea through the 1990's with Kim Jong Il.

The state of North Korea is really tied to the Kim Il Sung's reign, and the Juche philosophy, which is why North Korea is so insular and xenophobic.

Here's my suggested reading list:

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

Escaping North Korea

This is Paradise!: My North Korean Childhood

White Tigers: My Secret War in North Korea (Memories of War)

The Tears of my Soul: An autobiography of the bomber of Korean Air Flight 858

The Great North Korean Famine: How and why it happened, and why it will happen again and again.

"The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially on North Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II. The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II."

http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html

A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present

https://www.amazon.com/Concise-History-Modern-Korea-Nineteenth/dp/0742567133

Hey I have quite a few books from that period that could help you!
The first is Elites and Political Power in South Korea.
If you want a book about the Park Chung-Hee period and the elites at this time maybe read Korea's development under Park Chung-Hee.
If you want to read about the elites and political climate during the democratisation period perhaps read From transition to power alternation..
Finally if you want a book that discusses the general climate and to see how elites are viewed give Democracy and authority in South Korea a read.

Hope this was helpful :) Sorry if the books are a bit expensive...I got them free from my library so I didn't realise how much most of them cost. You said you wanted detailed analysis and these are very detailed.

Edit: Just wanted to add it is a very interesting period and topic, I read alot about it myself if you couldn't tell ;)

If you honestly believe that, I would suggest reading this book.

Their political system is incredibly dysfunctional and their economy ceases to function as a result. This type of political system has no place in modern times and is leading to the starvation and deprivation of the N. Korean people. I think this book might change your opinion that they have a relevant political system.

Of course all information is colored by propaganda. But the data is still data and got can interpret it how you want. For example, I disagree with the theme and conclusions of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/North-Korea-Markets-Military-Rule/dp/0521723442

But it still contains an excellent overview of the data that is available and the empirical problems with it. I would recommend this article as well:

http://apjjf.org/2014/12/18/Henri-Feron/4113/article.html

Which goes over the basics of why we actually know quite a lot about the specific thing we are discussing (the character of North Korean production). We can toss out the bank of korea data and the cia data but that's something that can be tested empirically, not just a political question.

Sorry to get so testy but sociology is just like physics. No one feels the need to give their opinion on pions if they have not studied it in depth and yet people think they can give grand proclamations about history, economics, and politics of North Korea because the US media ran a story about Kim Jong-un's eating habits. I will argue about the extent of marketization, the flawed understanding of modes of production that bourgeois scholars approach the issue with, and the definition of socialism and how we can test it. But arguing about the north Korean economy as having slave labor (meaning here that slavery exists at a systematic level) is pure racist propaganda with no basis in fact.

There's an interesting book by Erik Cornell, the first Swedish ambassador to North Korea about his times there. He retells some of the more strange things, my favourite is when the embassy basement suddenly filled with smoke and no one could understand why. Turned out that tunnels connected the embassy basements to some kind of listening post and they guys manning it had been less than careful when warming their lunches and caused a small fire. The government denied the whole thing.

First, I have a very US-centric perspective, so you may notice that in my recommendations. I'm just looking at my bookcase recommending anything I've read and enjoyed (if it's on my bookcase, I enjoyed it). I have a lot more books in boxes, so if you want more recommendations do let me know. Also, if you want more information on any of the books, feel free to ask me.

Books:

History of the World by J.M. Roberts

A Study of History by Arnold Tonybee

Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thorton

The Story of Civilization - Will & Ariel Durant

Separated at Birth: How North Korea Became the Evil Twin by Gordon Cucullu

The Fall of Japan: The Last Blazing Weeks of World War II by William Craig

The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill

China's Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture by Charles Hucker

Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics by Colbert Held

Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Ian Bickerton

The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict by Walter Lagueur

A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden

The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880-1950

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn


The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

The Second World War by Winston Churchill

Documentaries:

The World at War

Ken Burns: The Civil War

Civilisation: A Personal View

Consider looking into Hobbes and Marx and Nozick and maybe Rawls, just to add a bit to your list of political theory basis. I mean, there's tons more, but those are a few I think are super interesting and would probably help.

Anyways, here are a few books I read for an undergrad polisci topic on American foreign policy towards Asia:

The International Politics of the Asia Pacific by Michael Yahuda.

Obama and China's Rise: An Insider's Account of America's Asia Strategy by Jeffrey A. Bader.

International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific by Ikenberry and Mastanduno.

That is a good question. I read plenty before going. Even having a degree in Asian Politics and having read plenty I found that many of them did not capture the society very well.
Bruce Cumings "North Korea: Another Country" http://www.amazon.com/North-Korea-Another-Bruce-Cumings/dp/156584940X

This book is accused of pro-DPRK bias. I would call it more getting a better understanding of internal thinking. He explained it better than most. His latest book "The Korean War" is a great look at the war in most brutal terms.

Many of the books have great parts such as Hassig and Oh's "The Hidden People" but some of it does not quite make sense. If you read enough of this stuff you see that they have to cite the same sources.

Brad Martin's "Under the Loving Care" is a journalist's view and he pulls everything together, some of it is not credible. I think the book needed editing, say 20% left on the floor.

Andrei Lankov's "North of the DMZ" is a good book. He is a Kim Il-sung University graduate. I do not agree with all of it but he lived it. I read his commentaries and it is much better than most.

This is a tough subject, a closed country and a difficult society to understand. So few have been there and even fewer more than once. I do think we are getting a better view of what goes on as the place opens up - slowly but things are changing.

1984 - but seriously perhaps this is what you are looking for

I read this book & would highly recommend it for historical perspective. I agree with the other poster that this will be Sunshine Policy v2 (only probably with an accelerated timescale, just like everything else these days).

Biggest takeaway for me from that book is just how rationally North Korea acts. Everything they do makes perfect sense, they're just assholes.

Also, that there's really no good path forward, just various shades of bad paths forward. Our best hope IMHO is to slowly turn the population on to the oppression they face.


The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1511383941/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_-VQNAb68GHBPM

"The New Koreans" is a recent publication (copyrighted 2017, although the narrative ends right before the juiciest moment of the decade, choigate, so more like 2016) that goes deep into korea's past and present. Even some points I never considered before.

However, read it with a grain of salt, because some of the things it says are just flat out wrong or biased (like claiming that korea's panic over pyramid scheme con artistry were an act of protectionism against western soap products, and implying that comfort women issue is nothing to bat an eye about because Joseon was a patriarchal society at the time. REALLY? ).

The summary says it outlines the three miracles of korea, each reportedly blew the author's mind as it happened. Economic miracle of the 70s, then democratic miracle of the 90s, then the miracle of breaking out in the world stage as a cultural powerhouse in the last decade. He doesn't really go into the last part in detail, and I can't blame him because he's been alive since the days of Park Chung Hee.

If you want a nice, entertaining and also informative reading on the cultural part, then pick up Birth of Korean Cool

Read about the book here.

Did you read Lankov's recent book? Good stuff.

> not to mention reversing decades of psychological and political brainwashing.

am reading this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-State-North-Korea-Future/dp/B00PWOK478

so sadly i think you are underestimating the problem, i would compare it to what people going out of a very extreme cult must go though, a complete reeducation.

here is the tread where i asked for book recommendations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/northkorea/comments/63ys9j/looking_for_a_good_ebook_about_north_korea/

Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis by Mike Chinoy.