The Eternal Tour Ends (For Now)
Dajia hao from Beijing—I’m back home after a fifth and final week of taking KOREAN MESSIAH out for a spin. It’s been equally exhausting and exciting, and I’m grateful for all the love and support—and glad to have made it back to China before Donald Trump graced us with his presence. I’ve only just had…
Messiah of the North
Hello from north of the border. I’m back in Toronto, the city by the lake—the place where I was born—and bringing the KOREAN MESSIAH tour to a whole new country. It’s been a grueling four-week, six-city East Coast U.S. tour. I’ll be slowing down the pace here in Canada, with just a pair of public…
Messiah in the City
Greetings from the NJ Transit passenger carriage. As I write, I’m chugging through America’s finest state, launched from the bustle of New York City and through bucolic towns like Elizabeth and Rahway en route to Princeton Junction. I spent the past week in the big city, bringing news of the advent of KOREAN MESSIAH to…
New York Times: “Highly Original, Deeply Researched and Cogently Observed”
It’s publication day here in New York, and I’m happy to report that the first reviews of KOREAN MESSIAH are starting to roll in. Bruce Cumings, in the New York Times, describes the book as “highly original, deeply researched and cogently observed.” He continues: “I have been a scholar of Korea for decades, but I…
Hello From New York
Hello from New York, where I’m excited to bring KOREAN MESSIAH into the world. I’ll be doing a series of events this week, including at the Korea Society with Barbara Demick; at the Asia Society with Orville Schell and Julian Gewirtz; at Columbia University with Tony Namkung, who inspired me to write this book; and…
On the Road
Hello from Boston, where I’m set to embark Tuesday on my book tour down the East Coast of the U.S. (plus a week in Canada). If you’re in Boston, New Haven, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Washington, or Toronto over the coming month, please check out my book website for the tour dates. I’d love to…
Writing the Book I Wanted to Read
The genesis of KOREAN MESSIAH began more than a decade ago, when I was getting set to move to Seoul to take up a posting in The Wall Street Journal’s Korea bureau. In my preparatory reading on North Korea, I was perplexed by references to Kim Il Sung’s Presbyterian upbringing and eager to read more…
When Pyongyang was the “Jerusalem of the East”
Today, Pyongyang is best known as the sacred capital of North Korea’s Kim dynasty. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it had a different reputation altogether: as the “Jerusalem of the East,” the center of Christendom in East Asia and home to some of the world’s biggest Presbyterian missionary institutions. At its…
The Greatest of All Time
Is Kim Il Sung the object of the greatest personality cult in human history? Certainly, history has seen its fair share of remarkable personality cults: Take Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceaușescu, or Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov. Turn back the clock and you could throw in Augustus Caesar, the Pharaohs of Egypt, Louis XIV. Still, Kim Il Sung…
The Preacher and the Great Leader
The story of KOREAN MESSIAH begins—and ends—not with Kim Il Sung but with another man whose life was intertwined with Korea’s story. His name is Billy Graham, and by the time he landed in Pyongyang on March 31, 1992, the North Carolina native was the world’s best-known Christian preacher. Rev. Graham had prayed with every…
The Ayatollah’s Demise
As American and Israeli missiles rain down on Tehran, how does it all look from Pyongyang? On one level, Pyongyang won’t be thrilled about possibly losing a friend on the global stage. But there are also vast differences between North Korea and its fellow charter member of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” North Korea…
“Just Think of God as Kim Il Sung”
Ju Il-lyong first heard the Christian message over a small black radio. It was the early 2000s, and Ju and his family were suffering through the depths of a devastating famine that began ravaging North Korea around the time of state founder Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The…
The Power of Kim Il Sung’s Personality Cult
When the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union fell in 1989 and 1991, it looked to many that North Korea would not be far behind. In April 1991, with the USSR’s dissolution in full swing, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quipped: “I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro…
Why I Wrote This Book
I first began cooking up the idea for KOREAN MESSIAH after arriving in Seoul for The Wall Street Journal in 2013. By the time I sold the book four years later, it was the height of the North Korean nuclear crisis. In 2017, Donald Trump had just taken office and Kim Jong Un was embarked…
Announcing: Korean Messiah
My first book, KOREAN MESSIAH, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 14. It’s the product of a decade wrestling with a question: How did North Korea come to be this way? To me, there was always something unmistakably religious about North Korea: the bowing at the statues, the wearing of the Kim…