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Title details for The Rebel and the Kingdom by Bradley Hope - Wait list

The Rebel and the Kingdom

The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime

by Bradley Hope
Lee Osorio
Audiobook
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How did an Ivy League activist become a global fugitive? The New York Times bestselling co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil chronicles the heart-pounding tale of a self-taught operative his high-stakes attempt subvert the North Korean regime.

“Propulsive . . . Hope’s account is both deeply reported and novelistic.”—Ed Caesar, contributing staff writer for The New Yorker, author of The Moth and the Mountain
In the early 2000s, Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken Yale undergraduate looking for his place in the world. After reading a harrowing account of life inside North Korea, he realized he had found a cause so pressing that he was ready to devote his life to it.
 
What began as a trip down the safe and well-worn path of organizing soon morphed into something more dangerous. Hong journeyed to China, outwitting Chinese security services as he helped asylum-seeking North Koreans escape across the border. Meanwhile, Hong’s secret organization, Cheollima Civil Defense (later renamed Free Joseon), began tracking the North Korean government’s activities, and its volatile third-generation ruler, Kim Jong-un. Free Joseon targeted North Korean diplomats who might be persuaded to defect, while drawing up plans for a government-in-exile. After the shocking broad-daylight assassination in 2017 of Kim Jong-nam, the dictator’s older brother, Hong, along with U.S. Marine veteran Christopher Ahn, helped ferry Kim Jong-nam’s family to safety. Then Hong took the group a step further. He initiated a series of high-stakes direct actions, culminating in an armed raid at the North Korean embassy in Madrid—an act that would put Ahn behind bars and turn Hong into one of the world’s most unlikely fugitives.
 
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, The Rebel and the Kingdom is an exhilarating account of a man who turns his back on the status quo—to instead live boldly by his principles. Acclaimed journalist and bestselling author Bradley Hope—who broke numerous details of Hong’s operations in The Wall Street Journal—now reveals the full contours of this remarkable story of idealism and insanity, hubris and heroism, all set within the secret battle for the future of the world’s most mysterious and unsettling nation.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 1, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593629581
      • File size: 252831 KB
      • Duration: 08:46:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 3, 2022
      Wall Street Journal reporter Hope (coauthor, Blood and Oil) delivers a riveting saga of one man’s unlikely crusade to free North Korea. Adrian Hong, the son of South Korean missionaries, formed the activist group Liberation in North Korea while attending Yale University in 2004. Inspired by Kang Chol-hwan’s book The Aquariums of Pyongyang and the documentary film Seoul Train, Hong arranged for three North Korean teenagers to leave China for the U.S. A subsequent attempt to help six more defectors failed, however, and Hong spent 10 days in a Chinese prison before returning to America. He founded a secret new group, now known as Free Joseon, dedicated to overthrowing dictator Kim Jong-un’s regime. In February 2019, Hong and other group members broke into the North Korean embassy in Madrid and took the staff hostage for five hours before fleeing. They claim the break-in was a ruse staged to help the North Korean ambassador and his family defect, but the plan fell apart when the wife of an embassy official jumped from a second-floor window and alerted the police. Hong is currently in hiding, while one of his accomplices is in U.S. custody and fighting extradition to Spain. Hope has impressive access to Free Joseon and other activist groups and draws a vivid portrait of Hong, whose mix of courage, opportunism, and yearning fascinates. This is the stuff great political thrillers are made of.

    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      Investigative journalist Hope (Billion Dollar Whale; Blood and Oil) writes that he has "kept tabs" on Adrian Hong Chang, who goes by Adrian Hong and several other aliases, since the latter contacted him about a story he broke during the 2011 Arab Spring. Hong, a Yale graduate and founder of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), was on his way to help evacuees from Libya's civil war, where Hope had encountered and reported on a Korean American college student who joined the rebel cause on his summer vacation. Drawing on a decade of tracking and researching Hong, as well as subsequent conversations with the man he took to be a dedicated human rights advocate and source on all things opposed to North Korea, Hope authoritatively and exhilaratingly reveals Hong's covert campaign not only to rescue North Korean refugees but to take direct action against the Kim regime. Lee Osorio narrates the audiobook with thriller-like intensity, making an already incredible true story into a nonstop listen packed with evidence and action. VERDICT The motives of secret organization Free Joseon and its founder Adrian Hong are vividly revealed and compellingly narrated; it would make a perfect follow-up to Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14.--Lauren Kage

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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