My Friend Kim Jong Un - by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Canadian 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.

Review Quotes

"The Waiting... continues Gendry-Kim's unflinching portrayal of the displacement caused by war, migration, and bias." --NPR

"The artist's stark brushstrokes and narrative masterstrokes make an affecting combination, as hope and heartbreak span generations." --The Washington Post

"The traumas of history blur into the present in a time-bending Korean graphic novel." --The Los Angeles Times

"Gendry-Kim... prov[es] yet again that she's an essential voice in global comics." --Publisher's weekly, Starred Review

About the Author

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was born in Goheung in Jeolla Province. She has cartooned the graphic novels Grass, The Waiting, La saison des pluies, Jiseul, Jun, The Naked Tree, and Alexandra Kim, a Woman of Siberia; the autobiographical comic The Song of My Father; the three-volume children's comic Coquinette; the picture books The Baby Hanyeo Okrang Goes to Dokdo and A Day with My Grandpa; and the children's book My Mother Kang Geumsun. Grass (Drawn & Quarterly, 2019) appeared on Best of the Year lists from the New York Times and the Guardian, and received the Cartoonist Studio Prize for the Best Print Comic of the Year, the Big Other Book Award for Best Graphic Novel in 2019, the Harvey Award for Best International Book, and the Krause Essay Prize in 2020.