Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung

Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung - Hardcover

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Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung
  • Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung
Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung - Hardcover

Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung - Hardcover

by Michael J. Seth
$32.40
$32.40

Book Overview

The life story of enigmatic North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, grandfather to Kim Jong Un.

Kim Il Sung (1912-94) ruled his country, North Korea, for longer and shaped it more profoundly than almost any other modern leader. He created a unique and seemingly bizarre and menacing political and social system, establishing a dynasty that has maintained it for two more generations. Yet he remains a curiously inaccessible, little-understood person, partly due to the closed and secretive nature of the state he founded. Historian Michael J. Seth puts together what we know of Kim's life from all available sources and places it in the context of Korean and modern world history to make both Kim and North Korea comprehensible. Forever President looks at the unusual circumstances that contributed to Kim's rise to power and the early experiences that help to explain the directions he took his country. It examines his impressive early achievements and his later failures, which left North Korea the isolated, impoverished half of a divided nation. Kim, it finds, was a charismatic and resourceful leader determined to reunify and modernize his country. But he pursued these aims with ruthlessness, egotism, and extreme narrow-mindedness. Ultimately, his political inflexibility led to disaster.
ISBN9781836391043
Author Michael J. Seth
PublisherReaktion Books
GenreBiography and History
FormatHardcover
PublishedOctober 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages288
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography History Nonfiction

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About Michael J. Seth

Michael J. Seth is a professor of East Asian and world history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has lived and worked in South Korea and is the author of Education Fever: Society, Politics and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2002) and North Korea: A History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (Routledge, 2016).

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