[KS] KOREAN MESSIAH book announcement

[Jonathan Cheng]

Hi colleagues,

I wanted to spread the word on the release of my first book, KOREAN
MESSIAH: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality
Cult
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558235/korean-messiah-by-jonathan-cheng/>,
published by Alfred A. Knopf last week.

The book brings to life Pyongyang's emergence in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century as the "Jerusalem of the East," and describes Kim
Il Sung's upbringing in this milieu, tracing his ideological and spiritual
upbringing and then exploring how it helped underpin the construction of
his extraordinary cult of personality.

Bruce Cumings, reviewing the book in *The New York Times*
<https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/books/review/korean-messiah-jonathan-cheng.html>,
called KOREAN MESSIAH “highly original, deeply researched and cogently
observed…a brilliant history of North Korea.” And Elizabeth Economy of the
Hoover Institution, writing in *Foreign Affairs*
<https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/korean-messiah-kim-il-sung-and-christian-roots-north-koreas-personality-cult>,
called the book "an extraordinary work of research…Cheng demonstrates that
Kim appropriated, transformed, and embedded Christianity in the structure
of North Korea’s ostensibly secular state.” I hope you'll consider giving
it a read.

Full disclosure: I'm a journalist, not a scholar -- I've been the China
bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal for the past seven years, and
before that was the Korea bureau chief. Still, my path not taken was always
a Ph.D. in history, which you'll see in the 768-page length of the book
(including 145 pages of endnotes).

I'm happy to share review copies as requested, and am currently in the
midst of a book tour down the East Coast of the U.S., from Boston to
Washington (I'm in Princeton now), with a final stop in Toronto early next
month. I'll be back in Beijing for the Trump-Xi summit, but will plan on
making trips to discuss the book in Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, and
elsewhere in the region before doing a U.S. Midwest/West Coast tour in
October. My tour dates and other information on the book can be found here:
https://koreanmessiah.com/.

Best,
Jonathan


-- 
Jonathan Cheng 郑子扬
China Bureau Chief 中国分社社长
The Wall Street Journal 华尔街日报
Mobile 手机 +86-186-0005-6330
E-mail 邮箱 jonathan.cheng at wsj.com
Twitter/WeChat 推特/微信 @jchengwsj
Read my WSJ profile here <http://www.wsj.com/news/author/1291>
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