Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has written a fair, modest and informative book about North Korea, a country little known and less understood.

Between 2001 and 2008 she visited the place nine times and was enveloped in official company throughout. Apart from Pyongyang, a kind of Potemkin village the façade of which one would have to be half-witted not to see through, she merely glimpsed other parts of the country and its people, and ‘no unauthorized conversations took place’.

Feb 2010

Sweet and Sour

Case Closed?

They Have Been at the Core of Great Events

Tutorials from a Transvestite

Dog Days

What’s Behind the Blue Door?

Communist Poster Boy

Invasive Procedures

Flow Country

A Right Way to Remember?

Girls Allowed

Dig for Victory

Crossing the Yalu

Dining at Lizard’s Thicket

Escape from Entebbe

Wild West

Sage Government

Mission Impossible

One Man and His Lama

A Sorority of Character

Stealing the Crown’s Jewel

Tale From Tiananmen

The Shanghai Beat

Rebel Province

Picture The Revolution

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