North Korea: Another Country

By Bruce Cummings

New Press Books

2004

America’s leading historian on Korea offers nuanced analysis that demolishes familiar generalizations. In the battle to open closed Western minds, this tart and witty broadside makes an excellent start.
—THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an “insane” dictator at its helm, North Korea—charter member of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable of delivering them to America’s West Coast.

But, as Bruce Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than our leaders or our news media would have us believe. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Korea, and on declassified government reports, Cumings traces that story, from the brutal Korean War to the present crisis. Harboring no illusions regarding the totalitarian Kim Jong Il regime, Cumings nonetheless insists on a more nuanced approach. The result is both a counter-narrative to the official U.S. and North Korean versions and a fascinating portrayal of North Korea, a country that suffers through foreign invasions, natural disasters, and its own internal contradictions, yet somehow continues to survive.

Cumings counters the hype with an instructive history.
—The New York Times

Few books of political commentary are as insightful, outspoken, and even personable, as this one.
—Booklist

America’s leading historian and political analyst of contemporary Korea.
—Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback
 
Bruce Cumings is the author of Korea’s Place in the Sun, War and Television, Parallax Visions, and The Origins of the Korean War. He is a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he lives.