A new book on North Korea

The Japan Times Online

See above for a review of a new book about North Korea from the British diplomat who opened the British embassy there in 2001. Sounds very interesting:

"The "labour camps" and the reports of human-rights violations are described, as is the bizarre and ghoulish way in which the dead Kim Il Sung has been retained as president and is "revered" in ways that make the cults of Stalin and Mao Zedong seem tame."

I would like to know more about that.

In the meantime, North Korea gets a mention in the media recently here (for raising the spectre of nuclear war), and here (in relation to worries that it may well sell plutonium to Iran as a shortcut to Iran making a bomb.) What "interesting" times we live in.