Overview

An authoritative and frightening investigation into the dark side of North Korean societyNorth Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and big brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality.Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea. Having entered the country undercover, Sweeny posed as a university professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics.Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ--the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins--are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line, and the gulag awaits. State spies are everywhere, ready to punish disloyalty at the slightest sign of discontent.Drawing on his own experiences and his extensive interviews with defectors and other key witnesses, Sweeney's North Korea Undercover pulls back the curtain, providing a rare insight into life there today while examining the country's troubled history and addressing important questions about its uncertain future.

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9781504609456

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John Sweeney is a reporter for BBC Panorama who became a YouTube sensation when he lost his temper with a senior member of the Church of Scientology. Before joining the BBC in 2001, he worked for twelve years at the Observer, where he covered wars and revolutions and unrest in more than sixty countries. Over the course of his career, Sweeny has won one Emmy, two Royal Television Society Awards, one Radio Academy Award, the What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year Prize, an award from Amnesty International, and the Paul Foot Award. The author of eight books, his hobby is falling off his bike on the way back from the pub. Gildart Jackson's acting credits span the stage and screen. He is most often recognized for his roles as Gideon on Charmed and Simon Prentiss on General Hospital. He has also starred in numerous television shows, including CSI and Vegas, and recently played the lead in the highly acclaimed independent feature film You, directed by his wife, Melora Hardin.

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