A Kim Jong-Il Production

Author: Paul Fischer

When I first heard this story on This American Life, I just could not believe my ears. It was a fascinating and bizarre tale of kidnapping and movie-making in North Korea that seemed too outrageous for anyone to even make up as fiction. I had to learn more about this and I quickly found a book that described it all. I promptly searched my local library and checked out a copy of the book. 

As expected, this was a page-turner with Shin Sang-ok and Kim Jong-il taking center stage. You learn about the fascination that Kim Jong Il had with movies and how it influenced pretty much everything he did in North Korea.  He was very frustrated with the poor quality of North Korean films and decided to fix it by direct intervention. He found the most famous director (Shin Sang-ok) and actress  (Choi Eun-hee) in South Korean Cinema and had them kidnapped and taken to North Korea. As it turns out they were formerly married to each other, and he conveniently re-united them after the kidnapping.  Some of the early details after the kidnapping don’t make much sense and hopefully, one day, someone will discover a diary of Kim Jong Il that will shed some light on what his plans were in the first few years after the kidnapping. For a man who was obsessed by movies, he seemed to be in no hurry to put these two talented individuals to work.

The book gives you a good glimpse into the life of folks in the higher echelons of North Korean government. You will wince at the way people are treated in North Korean and the level of isolation they feel is something that is hard for us to comprehend in the western world. Especially in this day and age where once you have access to the internet, you pretty much have the ability to instantly acquire information from all corners of the world. 

In some ways Shin Sang Ok got to relive his dreams of directing movies even though he was always under the watchful eye of Kim Jong Il and his security guards. Read this book to learn all about the craziness of the North Korean Dictator, his obsession with making movies and the casualties in the process. 

All The Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr

I was halfway through this book when it was selected as the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2015.  This was probably the least surprising Pulitzer Prize winner in recent history, given that it has already spent 50 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Right from the start I could tell that I was reading an epic. The book narrates some heart wrenching tales from Germany and France during World War II.  The two main characters are both young adolescents,  growing up on different sides, during World War II.  Marie-Laure is a blind girl from France who is curious about everything around her that she cannot see. Werner Pfennig, is a gifted young orphan in Germany who is drafted for special training in one of the Elite Corps in Nazi Germany. While  this is categorized as a work of fiction, I won’t be surprised if many of the details in the book are uncomfortably close to the truth. The book is very well researched and is embedded with all kids of information from details of how wireless radios work to classifications of birds. One piece of trivia that I was surprised to learn was that John  Audubon, who is the father of modern bird watchers the world over, did not just paint  live birds that he saw in the forest. He shot and killed the birds and most often ended up eating them so that he could survive in the wilderness.

On reading the book, I was reminded of putting together a jigsaw puzzle. There are pieces of the story that unfold which don’t seem to fit anywhere. Rest assured that Mr. Doerr will find a way to make the pieces fit in the end. If I had one criticism about the book,  it is this very fact that takes away the suspense in the book. As you approach the latter half you can tell what is going to happen as the pieces of the puzzle that you have assembled clearly outline the missing pieces that you will uncover in the last few pages.

This is a book that should be read slowly and enjoyed. I always wonder if I have read enough books on World War II. This book is evidence that there is room for one more.