A briskly written primer on the North Korean decisions, foreign interventions and accidents of fate which have both threatened and, ultimately, preserved the country's dictatorship. This nimble tour through North Korea's history revisits sixteen knife-edge moments when collapse, reform or war nearly shattered the Kim dynasty. Structured in four acts--from the peninsula's partition in 1945 to Kim Jong-un's 2020 health scare--each chapter reconstructs a crisis and asks, what ...
