Heroes and Toilers

North Korea really comes alive in this book as a place inhabited by real human beings with the same problems we all have—a rare achievement in the literature. The author is objective in the best sense—he gives North Korea its due, unlike most authors, but also reserves a serious critique. Heroes and Toilers is by far the best recent book on North Korea and is one of the best books ever written on contemporary Korea. -- Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
With poetic fierceness, Kim tackles the knotted relationship between capital, nation, and state during North Korea’s nation-building years. His exhaustive archival research illuminates both the unique and universal aspects of North Korea’s industrial development. Kim’s sensitivity to language and image and his attentiveness to lived experience make for an intimate portrait of work and everyday life as embedded in politics and economics in a time of tremendous transformation. -- Dafna Zur, Stanford University
A pioneering exploration of post-Korean War industrial work in the DPRK, Heroes and Toilers greatly enriches our understanding of a crucial period and topic in North Korea’s history before the Juche era. Combining robust conceptual formulations with deft source analyses, the author illuminates the variegated ways in which ordinary North Koreans performed labor and pursued individual and collective goals, as reflective and willful humans in tune with the specific opportunities and constraints of their day. This superb book provides ample food for thought in its highly compelling placement of postwar North Korean industrialism and society within the core processes and trends of modern global history. -- Charles R. Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison
An outstanding study. * Choice *
Heroes and Toilers is the first academic monograph in English devoted specifically to the formation of North Korea's industrial labor force and the living conditions of workers, rather than describing the process of industrialization from the perspective of an economist. As such, it is an important contribution to scholarship. * Cross-Currents *
By employing the concepts of work and everyday life as his theoretical and analytical focus, Kim successfully demonstrates how dominance and resistance in everyday life translated into the dual outcomes of socialist industrial transformation and the consolidation of state hegemony in early North Korea. . . . Kim’s book provides insightful understanding for students and scholars of North Korean studies, socialism, and labor history. * Journal of Asian Studies *
Kim makes skillful use of a variety of materials to argue that state power and planning were incomplete and, indeed, relied on individual spontaneity and efforts to function at all. * Journal of Korean Studies *
Heroes and Toilers presents a counterargument to the claims that North Korea is an unknowable black box in the form of a cogent, balanced, and rigorously researched narrative that will resonate with historians, social scientists, and scholars of Korean studies. * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *