Anyone who reads the quality oregon has logged onto societal media is alert of the cult of property astir North Korea’s Kim dynasty. From afar, it’s astir cartoonish, with the bronze statues and the comic haircuts and the penchant for atomic threats. But examined up close, it’s remarkable—almost breathtaking—in its intensity, successful its durability, and, possibly astir strikingly, successful its religiosity.
When I archetypal started covering North Korea for The Wall Street Journal much than a decennary ago, I was perplexed to larn that Kim Il Sung, the authorities founder, had been calved and raised successful a devout Presbyterian family, connected the outskirts of a city, Pyongyang, that was truthful thoroughly Christianized that it was known arsenic the “Jerusalem of the East.” I wondered whether determination mightiness person been immoderate transportation betwixt Kim’s upbringing successful the religion and the religiosity of the property cult that helium constructed.
Over the people of 12 years of probe and writing, the grounds was, to my mind, unmistakable. Along the way, I realized conscionable however overmuch Kim Il Sung and the broader destiny of the North Korean radical are woven into the communicative of modern Korea—in each of its galore tragedies, from feudal decay to Japanese colonization to part and civilian war. It’s a magnificent story, albeit 1 afloat of heartbreak and pain.
Here are 5 books that were indispensable to my knowing of the story.
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Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives successful North Korea
(Random House)
This enactment of communicative non-fiction is rightly hailed arsenic the champion enactment connected North Korea’s devastating famine of the 1990s, which coincided with Kim Il Sung’s decease successful 1994. Here, Demick tells the communicative of Kim Il Sung’s 25 cardinal subjects done the idiosyncratic tales of conscionable a fewer of them, bringing to beingness not lone the calamity of North Korea’s astir hard period, but besides underscoring the powerfulness of the Kim household property cult adjacent astatine a infinitesimal erstwhile it seemed each was lost.
Richard E. Kim, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
(University of California Press)
This postulation of thinly veiled autobiographical vignettes from a pioneering Korean American writer offers a visceral, ground-level presumption of what it felt similar to unrecorded nether Japanese assemblage regularisation arsenic a Korean, and what it meant to spot Korea liberated—only to past spot it divided. Told with tenderness and empathy, this evocative postulation of stories from a third-generation Korean Christian writer captures the feelings of nationalism and shame that animated Kim Il Sung.
Richard E. Kim, The Martyred
(Penguin)
Richard E. Kim’s breakthrough caller tells the morally analyzable communicative of fourteen religion ministers captured during the Korean War. Twelve of them are executed connected the banks of Pyongyang’s Taedong River, and the advancing South Korean forces privation to crook them into martyrs. But an probe into the 2 survivors raises questions astir whether they betrayed their religion to debar execution. The world is acold much analyzable and gets to the bosom of the themes propelling this now-forgotten New York Times bestseller, arsenic good arsenic Korean Messiah: faith, nationalism, guilt, and information successful the look of unimaginable decease and destruction.
Masaji Ishikawa, A River successful Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea
(Amazon Crossing)
In caller decades, dozens of harrowing memoirs person been written by North Koreans who fled the country. But there’s a unsocial powerfulness to the accounts of overseas Koreans who accepted Pyongyang’s repatriation run successful the 1960s. The fearfulness of discovering that Kim Il Sung’s socialist paradise was thing but—and knowing what they had fixed up successful their erstwhile lives—only raises the motivation stakes of the determination to flee. Like Kang Chol-hwan’s amended known Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years successful the North Korean Gulag (English translation 2001), the beingness communicative of Masaji Ishikawa—the pseudonym of a half-Korean, half-Japanese lad calved conscionable extracurricular of postwar Tokyo—is a compelling if distressing read.
Julia Scheeres, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown
(Free Press)
The 1 enactment connected this database from extracurricular the satellite of North Korea comes from the jungles of Guyana—though adjacent there, Kim Il Sung’s beingness could beryllium felt. Rev. Jim Jones adopted 3 Korean children, praised Kim Il Sung implicit the loudspeakers astatine Jonestown, sent his squad to conscionable with North Korean officials, and adjacent considered relocating Jonestown to Pyongyang. Though galore accounts person been written of what happened astatine Jonestown, A Thousand Lives is simply a recent, much accessible introduction constituent into the astir unsettling occurrence involving a spiritual nine successful caller memory, offering a look into however property cults similar those of Jones and Kim are constructed and however they instrumentality hold.
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Jonathan Cheng’s Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, is disposable now.
English (US) ·