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The great leader and the fighter pilot : the true story of the tyrant who created North Korea and the young lieutenant who stole his way to freedom

Title: The great leader and the fighter pilot : the true story of the tyrant who created North Korea and the young lieutenant who stole his way to freedom / Blaine Harden.
Author: Harden, Blaine
Publication: New York, New York : Viking, 2015.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	JFE 15-2650	Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description

x, 290 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

"From the bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14, the murderous rise of North Korea's founding dictator and the fighter pilot who faked him out In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, New York Times bestselling author Blaine Harden tells the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was playing a high-risk game of deception--and escape. As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to love his Great Leader. That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today). The theft--just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953--electrified the world and incited Kim's bloody vengeance. During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans. Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the role of Mao and Stalin in Kim's shadowy rise, as well as from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world's longest-lasting totalitarian state"--

Subjects

Genre/Form

Biographies.
Biography.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-282) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Players and Game -- Part I: Guerrilla and Rich Boy -- Beginnings -- Poodle and Pretender -- Sweet-Talking Stalin -- Part II: War -- Great Liberation Struggle -- Kicked in the Teeth -- MiGs -- Return to North Korea -- An International Sporting Event -- Attack Maps and Defection Bribes -- Uncle Yoo -- Part III: Flight -- Flying Clear -- Squeezing the Moolah -- Right Stuff and Fake Stuff -- Learning and Purging -- Epilogue -- Time Line.

Call Number

JFE 15-2650

ISBN

9780670016570
0670016578
0525428909
9780525428909
9780525428909 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2014038542

OCLC

904046973

Author

Harden, Blaine, author.

Title

The great leader and the fighter pilot : the true story of the tyrant who created North Korea and the young lieutenant who stole his way to freedom / Blaine Harden.

Publisher

New York, New York : Viking, 2015.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-282) and index.

Connect to:

Cover image

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Research Call Number

JFE 15-2650

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