About Bradley K. Martin
Growing up in the U.S. South, Bradley K. Martin weighed career goals ranging from preacher to president. He began his involvement with Asia by studying Chinese language and Asian history as an undergraduate at Princeton University and went on to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand before starting his reporting career on The Charlotte Observer.
The two-time Pulitzer nominee has been bureau chief in Asia for the Baltimore Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Asia Times and Asian Financial Intelligence.
For Bloomberg News he was chief North Korea watcher.
Since 1979 he has made seven reporting trips to North Korea. He's the author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, which won the Asia-Pacific Special Book Prize -- and which the New York Review of Books called "simply the best book ever written about North Korea."
Nuclear Blues, his new novel set in North Korea, was conceived as a fiction sequel to his earlier nonfiction work.
He has taught journalism as a visiting professor at Ohio University, Louisiana State University, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, California State University, Fresno, and the University of Iowa.
Currently a contributor to Asia Times, he is working on new books.
Keep up with him on his Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/Bradley-K-Martin-101072081038/
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Nuclear Blues
by
Bradley K. Martin (Goodreads Author)
3.93 · Rating details · 29 ratings · 5 reviews
Burnt-out journalist Heck Davis has switched to a new career as a blues musician, but seeing his reporter pal gunned down at the 38th parallel drives him back into the fray. Dodging attempts on his own life, the bourbon-drinking, Bible-quoting, black-talking son of a white Mississippian father and Korean mother searches for answers in Kim Jong-un's North Korea. What he finds in that heart of darkness is an apocalyptic conspiracy.
Beautifully written, riveting in subject matter and plot and so timely it's positively eerie, Nuclear Blues will appeal to lovers of espionage, conspiracy, political, financial, religious and assassination thrillers as well as to fans of action/men's adventure, international mystery & crime and literary fiction. With its factual background (the author is also one of the leading nonfiction writers on North Korea), it will appeal to readers of current history looking for a fascinating and plausible answer to the question of how the North Korea crisis may play out. (less)
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Kindle Edition, 338 pages
Published November 12th 2017 by BookBaby
ASIN
B077DFZ9KC
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Dec 13, 2017Jeffrey Miller rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
For over sixty years, North Korea and the Kim Dynasty have been a tough nut to crack. While there’s never a shortage of news (and anxiety attacks) from the North, understanding what exactly is happening in the so-called Hermit Kingdom” with their weapons of mass destruction programs or tactics to reunify the peninsula has not always been an easy task.
However, there is one individual, Bradley Martin, who has been following and reporting about North Korea for decades and whose seminal Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader is a must-read for North Korean experts and novices alike. The same can be said about his latest literary offering, Nuclear Blues, which just might be the closest thing to understanding how the current North Korean drama will play out in Northeast Asia with the scenarios Martin advances.
This was a fun read from the get-go. I enjoyed the character of Heck Davis, a burned-out journalist, and how through a twist of fate, he finds himself caught in a web of intrigue and geopolitical drama as he tries to find out what happened to his friend. What makes this story all the more remarkable is how believable the story is whether Martin is describing a firefight in the Joint Security Area or a chance encounter with Kim Jong-un (rivaling Dennis Rodman’s forays into the North). What’s most interesting though is Martin’s take on how the North has managed to stay one step ahead of UN sanctions as it clings to its survival, not to mention what he thinks will eventually happen to the North.
You don’t have to be up on your North Korean history to enjoy this book. There’s plenty of action and drama to keep you riveted from one page to the next. This is the real deal, folks!
Jeffrey Miller,
Bureau 39
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Jan 18, 2018Charles Pomeroy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Excellent novel! Bradley Martin's "Nuclear Blues" is filled with insights on North Korea partly drawn from his earlier non-fiction work, "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader" (874 pages), which I read a number of years ago. These earlier insights are updated and presented in an imaginative and fast-paced fictional account of espionage, evangelical Christians, financial experts, Iranians, nuclear missles, and the North Korean leadership presented through the eyes of a mixed-blood journalist turned blues musician. All skilfully woven together in an intriguing tale. As a veteran of the Korean War and someone who knew Brad Martin during his stints as a correspondent in Tokyo, I highly recommend this book.
Charles Pomeroy (less)
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Jun 06, 2018Linda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I loved this book! I learned a lot about North Korea amidst the entertaining fiction in this humorous, tension-filled, intriguing story. I’m sad it’s over and hope there’ll be another Heck Davis novel soon.
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QUOTES BY BRADLEY K. MARTIN
“In North Korea a person has two lives, natural and political. But once you get sent to a prison camp your political life is over and you have only your natural life. You’re nothing, an animal, a savage. The guards have the right to kill you without penalty because you’re just an animal. If you disobey them or talk back, the guards hit you. It’s human nature then to fight back, but if you do they’ll shoot you. In one year’s time they would stage public executions fifteen or twenty times. People who tried to escape and didn’t get far were simply shot on the spot. But if you cost the guards a lot of time and trouble before they recaptured you, they would have a public execution.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
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“In Hwang’s view, the Pyongyang leadership “used the feudalistic idea of filial piety to justify absolutism of the Great Leader. Filial piety in feudalism demands that children regard their parents as their benefactors and masters because they would not have existed without their parents. Taking care of your parents, the people who gave you life—in other words, being dutiful children—is the ultimate goal in life and the highest moral code. The state is a unity of families, and the head of all these families is none other than the king.” Hence the role that the leadership devised for Kim Il-sung: father of the people. In the same way that a person’s physical life came from his parents, his sociopolitical life came from the Great Leader. And the regime maintained that this sociopolitical life was far more precious than mere physical existence, which even animals possessed.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
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“European who served for many years as a diplomat in Pyongyang, with postings there off and on from the 1970s into the 1990s, likened North Korea to a Catholic state in the Middle Ages. He estimated that around 90 percent really believed in the regime and its teachings—while the other 10 percent had no choice but to pretend that they believed. As opposed to other communist countries, where jokes about leaders such as the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker were a staple of conversation, there were no jokes about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, the diplomat said.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
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