Authors & Asia: The Great Leader and The Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea
VIEW EVENT DETAILSIn Collaboration with Brazos Bookstore
From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden tells the riveting story of Kim Il Sung’s rise to power, and the brave North Korean fighter pilot who escaped the prison state and delivered the first MiG-15 into American hands.
As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to love his Great Leader. That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today). The theft, just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953, electrified the world and incited Kim’s bloody vengeance. During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans. Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the role of Mao and Stalin in Kim’s shadowy rise, as well as from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state.
Authors and Asia: The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea is in collaboration with Brazos Bookstore. Asia Society is proud to be a presenting partner. Please note that this program will take place at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street.
Related Links
The Wall Street Journal: Flight to Freedom
The New York Times: ‘The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot,’ by Blaine Harden
The Washington Times: BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot’
About Blaine Harden
Blaine Harden is an American author and journalist. His 2012 book, Escape From Camp 14, was an international bestseller translated into 27 languages. It’s the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a N. Korean prison camp to escape to the West. The book and Shin’s testimony pushed the United Nations to create a Commission of Inquiry that concluded in 2014 that North Korea continues to commit crimes against humanity in its gulag of prison camps.
For 28 years, Blaine worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. For four years, he was a local and national correspondent for The New York Times and a writer for Time magazine. He has also reported for PBS Frontline, The Economist, Foreign Policy, National Geographic and The Guardian. Gonzaga University (Blaine’s alma mater) awarded him a honorary doctorate in 2015.
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