Kim jong 2 biography of martin

() Tried to fit 3 or 4 different books into one, and it suffered

My primary criticism of this book is that Martin didn't stay focused on one project. He starts off with a tertiary source historical account of North Korea since World War II. That's fine, and he adopts a very objective tone, citing arguments on both sides of many unanswered questions (at least in the West) about North Korea's policies and leaders. We then shift into defectors' narratives, along the lines of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (which is so so much better--read that!). We downshift into interview transcripts of more defectors, and it starts to feel like he just got lazy/sloppy or just ran out of time as we just read interview after interview. He has some organization about which interviews he includes when, but the structure is weak and he should've just made his arguments using snippets of interviews as evidenceor just let them tell their stories. It was a poorly executed hybrid. We then start a brief section of speculation as to what the future holds for the Korean peninsula, who Kim Jong-Il's successor will be (this was published in mids), and what the US, South Korea and Japan should do to re