Book Review by Wyatt Mason

The Hannah Arendt Center's Senior Fellow, Wyatt Mason, has a book review in the February 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

He reviews, The Orphan Master's Son, a novel about life in totalitarian North Korea penned by Adam Johnson:

Intention, significance, purpose: the design of the powerful first part of the novel is full of such qualities, confining the reader within the narrow channel of Jun Do's consciousness as he is moved like a chess piece by the hidden hand of the state.  Johnson, an American novelist whose research for the book took him to North Korea, does a superb job of conjuring the almost surreal particularities of the country, its cities that go dark at nightfall, as the nation's generators go silent until dawn. Grass sprouts from the rooftops of tall apartment buildings and lambs can be found grazing on these aerial pastures, the occasional ill-starred creature crossing the border of its tiny world and plummeting into traffic only to be stolen away almost immediately by a hungry citizen.

You can read the full review behind the firewall at The New Yorker online if you have a subscription, or in the magazine which is on newsstands now.