The nutshell: Lankov, a historian at South Korea’s Koomkin University who lived as an exchange student (from the Soviet Union) in North Korea in the 1980s, reveals the methods behind Pyongyang’s seeming madness and what it’s like to be an ordinary citizen of North Korea.

Literary lovechild of: Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty and Julia E. Sweig’s Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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