Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961. By Cheehyung Harrison Kim. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 280 pp. ISBN: 9780231185301 (paper)

[...]he shows how everyday life merged life and work though the ideological power of repetition. [...]while he downplays state dominance over people through oppression, he accentuates how the repetitive and ubiquitous functioning of work in everyday practices advanced state interests, as demonstrated in the detailed examples of the Chŏllima movement and the construction of Vinalon City in the late 1950s and early 1960s, respectively. [...]although the author explains Ch'a Munsŏk's quintessential concept of “the utopia of anti-labor,” it would have been helpful had Kim compared more fully the different approaches to analyzing and narrating North Korean labor history.1 Although it is difficult to access North Korean primary sources from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly for everyday life, Kim fills in the lacunae through discursive analysis of North Korean periodicals, labor heroes’ memoirs, films, and literature. Perhaps most importantly, his calls for the emancipation of labor and for “socialism beyond capital” remind us of an essential yet much neglected challenge while living in a full-fledged neoliberal age. 1 Kim Yŏnch’ŏl, Pukhan ŭi sanŏphwa wa kyŏngje chŏngch'aek [North Korean industrialization and economic policy] (Seoul: Yŏksa pip'yŏngsa, 2001); Cho Chŏnga, “Sanŏphwa sigi Pukhan kongjang ŭi nodong kyuyul hyŏngsŏng: kyoyuk kwa tongwŏn ŭi kyŏrhap chungsim ŭro” [The construction of labor discipline in North Korean factories during the early industrialization period: