Word: jasper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bouffant hair, platform shoes, "pleasure groups" of attractive young women, and lusty appetite for fine wine and sushi, the North Korean dictator sometimes comes across more like a movie villain than a true menace. In Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, veteran journalist Jasper Becker dutifully recounts the strange tales of Kim's extravagance. But the author is less concerned with the Dear Leader's personality quirks than with the murder and misery under Kim's brutal rule. To Becker, Kim Jong Il is not a cartoonish Dr. Evil?he's just evil...
...laden Kinta Valley during and after World War II. The "factory" is a nondescript shophouse Johnny buys in 1942 to serve as home and headquarters for his many business schemes. "Our house was not the kind of place just anyone could visit," writes Johnny's only son Jasper, the first of the book's three narrators. "To be invited, you had to be like my father?that is to say, you had to be a liar, a cheat, a traitor, and a skirt chaser. Of the very highest order...
...Having grown up tracking his father's venality, Jasper has little use for the man. But two other observers provide a less sinister account. Snow Soong, daughter of the biggest Chinese tin magnate in the valley, is a willowy beauty whom Johnny woos and weds through guile and determination. Barely a year later Snow dies giving birth to Jasper, but not before producing a diary that forms the second narrative. It depicts Johnny as a clueless bumpkin whom she can't wait to ditch, probably for a suave, handsome Japanese professor named Kunichika who has befriended her parents...
...Snow also describes an episode Jasper overlooks: a bizarre honeymoon she and her new husband take to the mysterious Seven Maidens islands somewhere off the Malaysian coast. For complicated reasons, the pair are accompanied by Kunichika and by Peter Wormwood, an effete young Englishman trying to tutor Johnny in the ways of the rich and British. Wormwood, the third narrator, writing years after Johnny's death, reveals all?about the murder of a British mine operator on the trip, about Kunichika's sinister connections to the Japanese troops then poised to invade the Malay peninsula, and about Johnny's growing...
...Still, the samizdat film fits the picture painted by recent defectors of an increasingly angry and desperate populace. "I really think it reflects the popular mood," says Jasper Becker, author of a forthcoming book titled Rogue State: The Continuing Threat of North Korea. "There is a persistent pattern of people trying to voice their hatred of Kim Jong Il and blame him for the disasters that have overtaken the country." Those voices may be getting louder, but it's not clear that Bush?already entangled in Iraq?will be inclined to listen...