Tuesday, July 9, 2019

The Great Successor

The subtitle is The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un and the author is Anna Fifield (2019).

For me, this book was about trying to understand the situation in North Korea.  It is a brutal dictatorship that has become a family business.  And that familial lineage is likely the reason that the country will never open up in the way that other communist countries (like China and Vietnam) have -- to loosen the system and allow freer flow of information would implicitly weaken the Kim family's grip on power.  As far as nukes, they will never give them up.  They view them as the only defense against US aggression, and also saw during the Korean War how the threat of a nuclear strike by the US immediately ended that conflict.  The goal is to never be forced to entrust any other country with its national security.  This book is not a dense, heavy historical narrative, but it's a reasonable primer on this topic.

Broken Money

The subtitle is Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better , and the author is Lyn Alden (2023). I feel like I hav...