Lifting North Korea's curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society, that to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of megalomaniacs.To North Koreans, the Kims are more than just leaders. Kim Il-Sung is the country's leading novelist, philosopher, historian, educator, designer, literary critic, architect, general, farmer, and ping-pong trainer. Radios are made so they can only be tuned to the official state frequency. "Newspapers" are filled with endless columns of Kim speeches and propaganda. And instead of Christmas, North Koreans celebrate Kim's birthday--and he presents each child a present, just like Santa.The regime that the Kim Dynasty has built remains technically at war with the United States nearly a half century after the armistice that halted actual fighting in the Korean War. This fascinating and complete history takes full advantage of a great deal of source material that has only recently become available (some from archives in Moscow and Beijing), and brings the reader up to the tensions of the current day. For as this book will explain, North Korea appears more and more to be the greatest threat among the Axis of Evil countries--with some defector testimony warning that Kim Jong-Il has enough chemical weapons to wipe out the entire population of South Korea.

    gorgeous glitter with a high price tag. On a winter’s day it is beautiful, but on a spring day after bud burst it spells devastation. For Sean and Caro Feely, a couple whose love affair with wine and France has taken them through financial and physical struggle to create their organic vineyard, it could spell the end. Until they receive an unexpected call that could save their skins… This book is about life, love and taking risks, while transforming a piece of land into a flourishing vineyard and making a new life in France.

    By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, Liao Yiwu managed to get his subjects to talk openly and sometimes hilariously about their lives, desires, and vulnerabilities, creating a book that is an instance par excellence of what was once upon a time called “The New Journalism.” The Corpse Walker reveals a fascinating aspect of modern China, describing the lives of normal Chinese citizens in ways that constantly provoke and surprise.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    suburb. Instead, he humorously falls from one country to the next, striking out repeatedly with the local women, getting robbed, having dreams that became reality, self-diagnosing himself with a host of diseases, and suffering repeated bouts of stomach illness that made marathon bus rides superhuman feats of bodily strength. Along the journey he chronicles the friendships, the women, and the struggles, including one fateful night in Paraguay that he thought would lead to his end.(This book is intended for men, and will be almost universally disliked by women because of its sexist themes and occasional toilet humor.)

    However, there is nothing common about Jang. She is a woman of great emotional depth, courage, and resilience.Happy to serve her country, Jang worked in a factory as a young woman. There, a man she thought was courting her raped her. Forced to marry him when she found herself pregnant, she continued to be abused by him. She managed to convince her family to let her return home, only to have her in-laws and parents sell her son without her knowledge for 300 won and two bars of soap. They had not wanted another mouth to feed.By now it was the beginning of the famine of the 1990s that resulted in more than one million deaths. Driven by starvation—her family’s as well as her own—Jang illegally crossed the river to better-off China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice, pregnant the second time. She knew that, to keep the child, she had to leave North Korea. In a dramatic escape, she was smuggled with her newborn to China, fled to Mongolia under gunfire, and finally found refuge in South Korea before eventually settling in Canada.With so few accounts by North Korean women and those from its rural areas, Jang's fascinating memoir helps us understand the lives of those many others who have no way to make their voices known.

    These were the athletes in the Olympic marathon. So how did he end up with a bronze medal? How did he win the London marathon? And why does he still hold the English record for the distance?In this remarkable autobiography, he explains how -- how someone who was almost the bottom of the class when he first went to school, and even worse at sport, eventually turned himself into a world-class athlete, competing in top marathons all over the world, and genuinely going from last to first.As well as the enthralling life story of one of our finest distance runners, this book is a wonderfully clear and inspiring piece of life coaching for anyone who wants to make the most of their talents. But more than this, as Spedding says at the start, 'I believe that on occasions you can create the circumstances in which you can perform at a higher level than your talent says you can.' Spedding's own story, and his chronicle of the big races he excelled in, proves it's trueFor anyone aspiring to run a marathon, or indeed anyone who wants to set themselves a goal they think beyond their reach -- and achieve it -- this is an essential book.

    He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the Earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. The Sex Lives of Cannibals tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, toxic fish, and worst of all, no television or coffee. And that's just the first day. Sunburned, emaciated, and stinging with sea lice, Troost spends the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options. He contends with a cast of bizarre local characters, including "Half-Dead Fred" and the self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Tarawa (a British drunkard who's never written a poem in his life), and eventually settles into the ebb and flow of island life, just before his return to the culture shock of civilization. With the rollicking wit of Bill Bryson, the brilliant travel exposition of Paul Theroux, and a hipster edge that is entirely Troost's own, The Sex Lives of Cannibals is the ultimate vicarious adventure. Readers may never long to set foot on Tarawa, but they'll want to travel with Troost time and time again.

    Since leaving England aged 21 with an invitation to a Karachi wedding and a yearning for adventure, Christina Lamb has spent 20 years living out of suitcases, reporting from around the world and becoming one of Britain’s most highly regarded journalists. She has won numerous awards, including being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year a remarkable four times.‘Small Wars Permitting’ is a collection of her best reportage, following the principal events of the last two decades everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But Lamb’s main interest has always been in the untold stories, the people and places others don’t visit. Undaunted by danger, disease or despots, she has travelled by canoe through the Amazon rainforest in search of un-contacted Indians, joined a Rio samba school to infiltrate crime rackets behind Carnival and survived a terrifying ambush by Taliban.No less remarkable are the characters that Lamb meets along the way, from Marsh Arabs who covet Play Stations instead of buffaloes to an Armenian compère for performing dolphins with whom she travelled during the war in Iraq.Lamb’s writing is passionate, powerful and poetic, transforming reportage into literature. Through the stories she tells – and her own development from a self-confessed ‘war junkie’ to a devoted mother – Lamb attempts to comprehend the human consequences of conflict in the countries she has come to know.

    Fluorescent tubes on the ceiling hummed with blue light. The woman smiled and explained in a soothing voice that there were some “procedures” they had to go through. “We’re just going to put you under for a few minutes,” she said. One of the officials told me to turn around..“Do I have a choice?” I lowered my pants, exposing most of my left butt cheek.  The woman came up from behind me, and I felt a sharp prick as she pushed in the needle and rammed the solution into my muscle. When she finished, I sat down. “Which agency do you work for? CIA?” asked the other male official. “I operate independently,” I said. I started to feel good. Very good. I had the urge to laugh, even though nobody had said anything funny. “I’m a lone wolf. And I make burgers for a living. I’m a burger-making lone wolf.”I must have blacked out for some of it. When I opened my eyes again, the two men were there, but the woman was gone. I wiped my nose, and my hand came away bloody. I suddenly felt so sick and dizzy I thought I’d had a stroke. “What the fuck?In Pyongyang in 1994, Robert Egan was given Sodium Pentathol, or “truth serum,” by North Korean agents trying to determine his real identity. What was he doing in the world’s most isolated nation---while the U.S. government recoiled at its human-rights record and its quest for dangerous nukes? Why had he befriended one of North Korea’s top envoys to the United Nations? What was Egan after? Fast-paced and often astounding, Eating with the Enemy is the tale of a restless restaurant owner from a mobbed-up New Jersey town who for thirteen years inserted himself into the high-stakes diplomatic battles between the United States and North Korea.Egan dropped out of high school in working-class Fairfield, New Jersey, in the midseventies and might have followed his father’s path as a roofing contractor. But Bobby had bigger plans for himself, and after a few years wasted on drugs and petty crime, his life took an astonishing turn when his interest in the search for Vietnam-era POWs led to an introduction in the early nineties to North Korean officials desperate to improve relations with the United States. So Egan turned his restaurant, Cubby’s, into his own version of Camp David. Between ball games, fishing trips, and heaping plates of pork ribs, he advised deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, and other North Koreans during tumultuous years that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the rise of Kim Jong-il, false starts toward peace during the Clinton administration, the Bush “Axis of Evil” era, and North Korea’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2006. All the while, Egan informed for the FBI, vexed the White House with his meddling, chaperoned the communist nation’s athletes on hilarious adventures, and nearly rescued a captured U.S. Navy vessel---all in the interest of promoting peace.Egan parses U.S. foreign policy with a mobster’s street smarts, and he challenges the idea that the United States should not have relations with its adversaries. The intense yet unlikely friendship between him and Ambassador Han provides hope for better relations between enemy nations and shows just how far one lone citizen can go when he tries to right the world’s wrongs.

    It is an ugly, shameful story of being sold with her mother into slave marriages by Chinese brokers, and although she at first tried to hide the painful details when blending into South Korean society, she realized how her survival story could inspire others. Moreover, her sister had also escaped earlier and had vanished into China for years, prompting the author to go public with her story in the hope of finding her sister.

    He has been demonised as 'Dr Evil' for his nuclear programme which puts Korea on a collision course with the US. For this reason, the world has a stake in understanding this man and his little-known country. This account aims to tell the compelling story of Kim Jong-il and the country he leads, exploring the pressing question of how he manages to hold onto power in a country that is ravaged by famine and poverty. Unravelling the myths, mysteries, and fallacies that surround this small, desperate country, this fascinating story includes rare photos of Kim Jong-il and his brutal regime.

    When I m alone I am haunted by my truth. A girl who entered this world in a jail cell. A girl who was served struggle with a side of pain on a broken platter. A girl who was thrown into a tank with sharks deep in a world whose motto is to eat or be eaten. I can still see the dirt underneath my nails; I've fought too hard to get where I am and I don t plan on looking back. However, there s always someone waiting to knock me down because they don t think I deserve it. Well I say to hell with them. I've put in too much to allow anyone to drag me down. So either you re riding with me or against me...

    invasion of Iraq, Pittsburgh native and graduate student Ben Orbach traveled to the Middle East to experience the region first-hand. Despite having a degree in Middle Eastern studies, he was completely unprepared for what he discovered. Beyond the anti-American sentiment he expected, he found a complex, curious people whose lives were made even more difficult by an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. Live from Jordan is the story, told via his letters home, of Orbach's one year trip through Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and Turkey.As he begins his unforgettable journey which takes him from bustling bazaars to underground brothels, he meets all kinds of characters: a falafel cook who hates Americans because they "have no mercy," a kindly baker who wishes him "peace and blessings" every time he buys pita bread, and the curious, impassioned 21-year-old medical student with a penchant for debating U.S. foreign policy. From the angry streets of Cairo to the living rooms of ordinary people in Jordan and Palestine, Orbach offers an honest, balanced portrait of a region in turmoil and the vivid, misunderstood, and often welcoming people who inhabit it. With humor and wit, he sheds new light on a culture that few Americans understand. Engaging and evocative, Live from Jordan is a myth-breaking book that combines the lyricism of a travelogue with the insight of reportage.

    What they found was Kim Hyun Hee, an idealistic young woman who had been transformed by her country into an obedient killing machine. The Tears of My Soul is her poignant, shocking, and utterly compelling story. Kim Hyun Hee grew up in a country obsessed by the loss of South Korea, an Orwellian world where right and wrong, good and evil, slavery and freedom meant nothing but what the North Korean Communist Party said they did. At sixteen, she was singled out by the Party for her intelligence and beauty and given special training in languages. At nineteen she was honored to be chosen for the North Korean Army's secret and elite espionage school. There she was trained to kill with everything from her hands and feet to grenades and assault rifles, enduring years of grueling physical and psychological conditioning designed to make her an effective and utterly obedient tool of the Party's spy masters. And in 1987, at age twenty-five, she was sent on the mission that would, she was told, reunify her divided country forever. Kim and her control agent, a man she considered her spiritual father, were captured only hours after the explosion. They were provided with suicide capsules, but hers failed and, for the first time in her life, Kim was outside the control of her masters. After more than a year of soul-wrenching questioning and deprogramming by the South Korean police, Kim realized the full enormity of her crimes, made a full confession, and waited for execution. But in a remarkable decision that sparked national outrage, the South Korean president gave her a full pardon, declaring that she was as much a victim of North Korea as the passengers. Kim Hyun Hee has devoted the rest of her life to atoning for the 115 lives lost on flight 858.

    These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the ordinary - a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiar - even ostensibly mundane - details of our lives, Steinbach maintains, play a far more important part in shaping our identities and our sense of our relationship to the world than do the exotic encounters or momentous events to which we attach much significance. Alternately poignant and humorous, sedately contemplative and bristling with emotional energy, Steinbach's various musings on the daily rhythms of her own moods and experiences transform everyday life into a rich and meaningful journey.