Put This Book on Your List

North Korea expert Peter Hayes – the executive director of the research group Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development – described the novel as ”the best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has survived all these years when the rest of the communist world capitulated to the global market a decade ago.””This novel should be required bedtime reading for President Bush and his national security team,” Hayes said.

And that was precisely the point of writing the book, according to the author – whose name is not really ”James Church.” That is a pseudonym for what the book jacket describes as ”a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia” who ”has wandered through Korea for years.”

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In an interview, Church said he was frustrated by the limitations of the intelligence reports he wrote. He was often required to frame any information through the moral lens of Western society, which regards North Korea as one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

In the academic or intelligence world, an analyst who wrote about North Korea without the standard ”moral bubble” immediately would be accused of being blind to the ”awfulness of the place,” Church said. ”You don’t have to do that in a mystery story.” [link]

The book is “,” by James Church.