My Friend Kim Jong Un

Award-winning cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim demystifies the inscrutable North Korean leader. A woman falls over a thin black line, slicing her in two half becoming North Korea, the other half becoming South. From the Island of Ganghwa, a seemingly idyllic rural paradise just an hour outside of Seoul, North Korea sits mere miles away, visible from cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim s home and studio. It looms over her while she walks her dogs through the rice paddies. Artillery fire, helicopters, and sirens from a nearby military base paint her acoustic landscape. Gendry-Kim has written extensively about the pain and heartbreak experienced throughout Korea s recent history in her award-winning books Grass and The Waiting. In My friend Kim Jong-Un, Gendry-Kim looks not to the past, but to the present to the man currently responsible for upholding the national divide. Retracing his rise to power and uncovering his human side, Gendry-Kim explores the life of the supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea: from his birth to his international education, his tastes and hobbies, and his relationships. Gendry-Kim weaves her personal accounts from this process throughout the book, in her signature approach to personal nonfiction by including interviews with former South Korean president Moon Jae-in, North Korean defectors, researchers, journalists, Kim s former chef, and a friend from his boarding school days in Switzerland. My Friend Kim Jong-Un carries a message of peace and attempts to make sense of an awful chapter in Korean history. Translated by the award-winning Janet Hong, My Friend is a cautionary tale and education on what makes a dictator, at a time when these lessons are more relevant in the West than ever.