North Korea

I can't recommend Barbara Deming's Nothing to Envy (which I read last year) enough for how eye-opening it is about life in North Korea. In light of recent events and the near future, this book is a helpful guide to help understand (if that is even possible) the Kim dynasty in DPRK.

In addition, Evan Osnos' brief on his New Yorker blog, "After Kim Jong-Il," is a fantastic read that includes this gem.

When I visited North Korea on a tightly managed trip in 2005, I was well into an hour of chatting with a local mountain guide, a former military man, when he paused and asked sincerely about a detail of American nuclear policy: “I don’t understand why you had to use nuclear weapons in Iraq.” He was a handpicked interlocutor for foreigners, with a warm coat and privileged access to information, and he was, by all evidence, convinced that America had nuked Iraq (or was willing to maintain the charade that it had). I had a hard time coming up with another closed society in which the words from the top had been so efficiently delivered to the bottom. If that’s what he thinks about the occasional use of nuclear weapons, I wondered, what else does he believe?

There are many other must-reads out there. I tend to favor those written by the Western journalists based in China because many of them have actually been in North Korea recently. Like Osnos' visit, those trips have been orchestrated and closely watched. Sometimes, though, like when Osnos is asked a question that surprises him, they've caught glimpses of North Korea the rest of us normally would not get. The New York Times' Ed Wong went on a tourist cruise this summer, and last year Louisa Lim of NPR found herself briefly free of minders when she was covering the pageantry of the "coming out" of Kim Jong Un.