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Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, by Bradley K. Martin. This book focuses more on the history of North Korea and on the two Kims (Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il) than other books I've read, which have concentrated on either the great famine in the 1990s or on daily life in the world's harshest police state. The author is apparently a journalist who has covered North Korea extensively for a very long period of time (starting back in the seventies), and is able to bring that wealth of experience to his writing here. It's particularly interesting, now when North Korea is so clearly a "basket-case" state, to read about how it looked historically, back when outside observers thought there was still some chance that it was or could be a viable economy. At the same time, even as far back as the seventies the grotesque excesses of the Kims' cult of personality were already becoming apparent, to the extent that the nation's leaders were rebuked by the then-Soviet Union and/or China for their extremes of worship. (Martin makes the interesting suggestion that part of the reason why the state cult became as extreme as it did was because the potential heirs to the elder Kim used increasingly extravagant and slavish displays of fealty to their father as a means of competing for his favor.) It's an excellent book about the world's most bizarre society, fascinating, detailed, and readable all at the same time--no small feat.