It is not often that a reader comes across academic work and upon finishing reflects on its deep compassion. How is it possible for a book to be compassionate? In looking for the first time at recently opened and often overlooked archives, these two books humanely clarify the lived experience of geopolitics in North Korea before and after the Korean War. Each brings a measured, careful, and respectful analysis to a vast array of archival material. The authors sensitively delineate how people and nations form connections and alliances, make choices in contexts that shape values, and are buttressed and burdened by history.

Taken sequentially, Suzy Kim's Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 and Charles Armstrong's Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 read like their authors agreed to slice up the history of North Korea, pre- and post-Korean War respectively, shining light down unclear passages and exploring unidentified corridors in the historical record. Individually, the books are strong intellectual achievements that demonstrate the crucial importance of pre- and post-Korean War history to making an informed analysis of the region today. For this reason, I believe the books make essential reading for journalists and public servants posted to the region. Taken together, the books form a dialectic that further situates present-day studies of the Koreas historically, politically, and socioeconomically. The books would make an excellent duo on a North Korean studies introductory course. I picture them tandemly arranged on a syllabus with Suzy Kim's five-year study in the lead, and Charles Armstrong's thirty-plus-year study following behind, bringing the course to its natural denouement with books such as Patrick McEachern's Inside the Red Box: North Korea's Post-Totalitarian Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), or my own Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Such a course would demonstrate the intersection of the personal in the apparatus of the state, showing the nuance of politics in history, contemporary life, and government.

Kim's detailed and engaged study historicizes everyday life in North Korea, particularly as it was experienced through the People's Committees (inmin wiwŏnhoe). Revolutionary events shaped people's lives and the development of North Korea. Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution looks at the lives of ordinary people, taking attention that is usually reserved for the leadership and focusing it instead on individuals within the masses. Kim carefully examined documents in the National Archives seized by the US military forces during the Korean War. Such documents include short professional autobiographies, personal files, organization meeting minutes, educational materials, women's magazines, and court documents. However, Kim also goes further and interviews survivors of Seoul's Sŏdaemun Prison, notorious for housing political prisoners jailed by Japanese authorities, collecting oral histories that demonstrate further that life story is saturated with national history. Kim's book demonstrates that scholarship has formerly elided the five-year postliberation period of 1945–50 by containing it between 1937, the Sino-Japanese War, and the end of the Korean War. While the tendency to do that aims to highlight the long period of unrest, she states, “it erases liberation as a historical event that left an indelible mark on millions of people. Particularly for North Korea, the five-year period marked a definitive break with the past, with numerous reforms that involved mass participation at an unprecedented scale” (205–6). Kim identifies pivotal events that shaped the social environment for collective revolution in North Korea. The collective revolution took place against a backdrop of land reforms that rearranged social relations, elections that made people's committees institutions, and campaigns for literacy that granted fuller participation in Korean culture.

As an anthropologist who works with oral histories and focuses on the contemporary period, chapter 7 of Kim's book, titled “Liberated Space,” is of particular interest. In this chapter, she satisfies the anthropological necessity of self-reflexivity when she directly situates herself among her interlocutors, in this case a handful of individuals who recall the revolutionary years her narrative documents. She reflects on how her embodied status as a “relatively young, female Korean American graduate student” is perceived and thus shapes what emerges during interviews and after the fact. This chapter also nicely rounds out the book as a whole, coming as it does before the conclusion, in that it identifies how the everyday revolution of North Korea continues in pernicious ways in the lives of those she interviews. By extension the reader is able to imagine how the history continues in the present, and contemplate sensitive topics that continue to be silenced:

The contemporary geopolitical context on the peninsula shapes what kinds of stories get told on both sides of the 38th parallel. For this reason, this chapter would also find great use in a research methods class focused on oral history or interview techniques. Similarly, chapter 5, “Autobiographies: Narrating the Revolution,” is useful for not only identifying and assessing handwritten documents, but also situating them and divining meaning that extends beyond their linguistic content alone. If, as Kim identifies, life stories are suffused with national history, and vice versa, aspects of history continue to remain silenced on the peninsula. However, this book does much to remedy that silence, personalizing as it does the lived experience of a critical time in Korean history.

Armstrong's beautifully written Tyranny of the Weak is a crucial book for the study of the Koreas for its examination of North Korean socialism at its earliest development. Drawing, as Kim does, on a vast array of sources in multiple languages, Armstrong presents a masterful study of North Korea's international relations from its earliest history through to 1992. His archival materials come from the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, China, and the Soviet Union. He also makes use of the Cold War International History Project and the North Korea International Documentation Project documents through the Wilson International Center for Scholars. The book provides a context for the DPRK's foreign relations in the global context.

Although this is a book on North Korea's early international relations, one of the main aims of the book is to explain how North Korea acts as a fracture in the international system “that erupt[s] periodically into conflict” (p. 1). Armstrong states that North Korea's fracture is a “regional-cum-global” conflict that is not about resources, as we find in the Middle East or in cases of “disputed postcolonial national boundaries, and religion, none of which have much relevance in Korea and Northeast Asia” (p. 2). On this point, I am tempted to disagree with Armstrong, particularly as I understand North Korea to distinctly identify South Korea as an occupied territory. Indeed chapter 4 of Tyranny of the Weak shows how blurred those territorial boundaries were (p. 137). Armstrong states the fracture that flares into conflict has more to do with North Korea's position in the world during the Cold War era. Crucially, he states, for North Korea there was not one but three Cold Wars: the global Cold War (between the United States and its allies and the Soviets), the Sino-Soviet rivalry (from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1980s), and finally the “intense rivalry” between North and South Korea which still has no end (p. 3). Perception of the Cold War as “three Cold Wars” shapes how North Korea responds to the world; this is the fracture that keeps erupting. The book, on a secondary and general level, examines how small or “weak” states like North Korea resist or manipulate stronger states in the international system. Though this survival and success comes at great costs to its people, a point Armstrong makes, it is still remarkable that North Korea has been able to extract “maximum concessions” from its allies and even its enemies over the last six decades (p. 5).

Tyranny of the Weak starts with the outbreak of war, detailing the difficulties with food security that emerged in the wake of it—North Korea's first food crisis in 1953. After discussing the push for self-reliance, albeit within the socialist community, and for de-Stalinization and the rise of Kim Il Sungism, it moves through the period of the collapse of Eastern European communist states in 1989–91, and ends with both Koreas' joint entry to the United Nations in 1992. The first four chapters of the book focus on North Korea's relations with the communist bloc, in addition to examining North Korea's confrontation with South Korea and the United States from the Korean War to the Sino-US rapprochement in the early 1970s. Chapter 5 is a fascinating study of North Korea's relations with the Third World. North Korea's connection to the Third World involved attempts to transfer economic policies and agricultural use in the North to communist comrade countries abroad. Chapter 5 also explores how North Korea of the 1970s made overtures to capitalist countries. Chapter 6 focuses on the 1980s, exploring USSR and Eastern European relations with the DPRK, along with the announcement of Kim Jong Il as the heir apparent to the DPRK. The final chapter and the epilogue look at North Korea's economic and diplomatic decline and isolation. Armstrong's study identifies how “decades of maneuvering amongst allies and enemies” during the Cold War (the three Cold Wars) has produced a country that is resilient within its weakness (p. 7).

What I enjoyed most about this book, as mentioned at the start of this review, was its compassion. Armstrong states, “[T]his state of conflict is used by the North Korean regime to justify internal oppression.… [T]yranny within is often directly related to a sense of weakness toward external threats” (p. 9). One of the most engaging parts of the book is the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) and North Korea, a model for postcolonial nation building, which covers North Korea's global expansion into the Third World, in chapter 5. This chapter would be an engaging point of discussion for students in many disciplines, as it challenges contemporary understandings of North Korea as isolated and disengaged. It also shows how far the reach of North Korea has been globally—with Juche in Africa and North Koreans in Ethiopia. In the process of turning outward, somewhat surprisingly, North Korea looked to capitalist countries. Japan in the mid-1960s was home to ethnic Korean sympathizers who functioned as intermediaries for trade and investment (p. 169). A few decades of Third World diplomacy followed. North Korea offered an image of a country that was uniquely self-reliant, which proved a model for the Third World (pp. 178–79). This chapter also shows how North Korea's views of the Third World differed from those of the Soviet-aligned countries of Eastern Europe; North Korea saw it as a great opportunity to gain in international support through diplomacy. These international relations had unintended consequences for North Korea. For instance, the NAM Conference in Colombo in 1976 occurred at the time of the P'anmunjŏm Axe-murder incident, which damaged North Korea's reputation considerably. North Korea's support of African nations was not governed by loyalty to socialism—rather Pyongyang assisted rightwing dictators such as Seko of Zaire, Amin of Uganda, and Bokassa of the Central African Republic. In the end, Juche was brought to Africa (p. 192). As a result of North Korea's diplomacy with the Third World, the country achieved status at the United Nations General Assembly in 1975.

Both Kim and Armstrong have produced strong, impressive studies of North Korea that help to contextualize contemporary events in the region and on the peninsula in particular. These are compassionate books, not only for their respect toward the historical record and the hard graft of such research, but also because they delicately balance fact with empathetic understanding.