Global Hot Spots: North Korea

              North Korea is a hard topic to discuss with students, in my opinion.  How do you accurately portray the madness of Kim Jong-Il or the complexities of the situation over there without scaring children so much they won’t sleep for days?  Sometimes, if I think about it too long, I get scared about North Korea, or at the very least feel very, very, sorry for the people who have to live there.  So I think that Clive Gifford is a bold man to try to give students a comprehensive view of North Korea in his new book Global Hot Spots: North Korea.  I found this book informative, well-written, and most importantly, appropriate for children.

            Clive Gifford begins by asking what “hot spots” are and how they happen.  I like this, because it helps students to understand a term that they may have heard already.  Gifford lists four main reasons as to why hot spots happen, including disputes over land, religion and culture, government, and resources.  He then goes on to talk about how North Korea has been a political hot spot since the 1950s.  I like that this book is not ethnocentric.  It does not tell you where North Korea is in relation to the United States, nor does it immediately tell you that the United States had anything to do with the United States.  It is mentioned, but I like that it gives the Korean Peninsula attention in its own right.

            This book does not follow any storyline, but it is roughly chronological.  Every two pages focus on a new topic, something like “the threat from Japan” or “The Great Leader.”  Under each topic is very brief summary on what is contained within those two pages.  The topic “The Great Leader” has headings such as “strengthening his grip,” “repairing the damage” and “controlling information.”  In addition to giving information under each heading, many of the sections have quotes or “hot spot briefings” that give more information.  One quote from a North Korean teenager states that “I didn’t know about America, or China or the fact that the Korean Peninsula was divided and there was a place called South Korea.”  Without getting into anything too psychologically taxing, Gifford gives students a sense of how isolated North Korea is.  After I read that, I realized I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to have no idea that there was anything other than my own country.  While there is not much detail, I feel like Clive Glifford really does a good job of giving students an overview of North Korea.  Since this is a book published in 2010, it even talks about North Korea’s announcement in 2006 that it had successfully tested a nuclear weapon, and the author talks about the reaction to this around the world.

            The pictures in this book are insightful and meaningful.  While talking about the division across the 38^th parallel, the author gives a picture of two men standing in North Korea guarding a dirt road.  The division has become more definite, more structured, but students get the idea from the picture.  There are also photographs of the destruction caused by war in North Korea.  This picture shows a town that looks no better than Hiroshima after World War II.  This picture is juxtaposed by another picture on the opposite page showing a fifty foot statue of Kim Song-Il.  I like this choice, because it shows that while the country is starving, dying, desolate, the leaders are still concerned with their image and with their military.  This book also includes maps and graphs.  I think the most insightful graph is the one that shows how much many different countries spend on the military.  North Korea spends 22.9% of their Gross Domestic Product on military spending.  This is compared with Russia, who spends 3.9%, China who spends 4.1%, the United Kingdom that spends 2.4%, and a few other countries who do not spend anywhere near as much.

            This book would be next-to-impossible to use in an elementary school classroom, simply for the fact that most students have not had experience with the world at large as of yet.   At the elementary level, social studies begin with familiar things like families and neighborhoods, gradually moving to the state and then national level.  This book is much more suited for the middle-school level, where students are introduced to more global perspectives.  There are many Global Hot Spot books that talk about places such as Afghanistan, the Sudan, Tibet, Iraq, Colombia, Cuba, the Indian Subcontinent, and other places.  I could definitely see a middle-school teacher asking students to take these books, read them, and then come back and educate their fellow classmates on this tumultuous country.

            If you like Clive Gifford’s work, you’re in luck because he has written over 100 books for children and adults.  If you do not like this text, that is okay too because he writes on a variety of topics.  You can access his website here and see that his books cover topics such as football, motorsport, Olympics, phonics, science and technology, humanities, sport and leisure, and phonics, fun and fiction.  Overall, he tends to write non-fiction books because of his role as a journalist, but he also writes fiction books as well.