North Korea Through the Looking Glass. [The Power & Poverty of Ideology; The Turning Point Economy; The Military : Pillar of Society; The Foreign Relations of a Hermit Kingdom; etc]

Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, 2000., 2000. Very Good. vii, 246 pp., [16] p. of plates : illustrated ; 24 cm. ; pictorial wrappers ; uncorrected page proof ; ISBN: 0815764359 (pbk. : alk. paper); LCCN: 00-8812 ; OCLC: 43751559 ; Contents: 1 Looking Backward 1 -- 2 The Power and Poverty of Ideology 12 -- 3 The Turning Point Economy 41 -- 4 The Leader, His Party, and His People 81 -- 5 The Military: Pillar of Society 105 -- 6 Social Control 127 -- 7 The Foreign Relations of a Hermit Kingdom 148 -- 8 Dealing with the DPRK 185 ; "Drawing on more than ten years of research—including interviews with two dozen North Koreans who made the painful decision to defect from their homeland—Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig explore what the leadership and the masses believe about their current predicament. Through dual themes of persistence and illusion, they explore North Korea's stubborn adherence to policies that have failed to serve the welfare of the people and, consequently, threaten the future of the regime.Featuring twenty-nine rare and candid photos taken from within the closely guarded country, North Korea Through the Looking Glass illuminates the human society of a country too often mischaracterized for its drab uniformity—not a "state," but a community of twenty million individuals who have, through no fault of their own, fallen on exceedingly hard times." ; VG