RaveThe New Republic[Johnson] has rendered his world in a surprisingly vivid manner. Every backdrop—from the looming martyrs’ monuments that dot Pyongyang to the flow and cadence of North Korean propaganda radio broadcasts—resonates with verisimilitude … The ‘Dear Leader’ that appears in these pages is ingenious: a trickster, impish and insecure, whose good humor is almost more dangerous and unpredictable than anything else … In The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson has provided a striking sketch of this horrific psychological landscape; he shows that the people of North Korea are victims of a sort of national Stockholm syndrome, by which affection for the trinity of Kims is coerced, yet also strangely heartfelt.
Pankaj Mishra
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMishra may well be the ideal writer to diagnose our current moment. For more than two decades, the Indian essayist has grappled with the epochal question of what it means to be modern ... We live in revolutionary times. In Age of Anger, Mishra has produced an urgent analysis of a moment in which the forgotten and dispossessed are rising up to challenge everything we thought we knew about the state of the world.
