The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and The Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015: A lot of ink has been spilled writing about North Korea lately, and for good reason: the Hermit Kingdom is inscrutable, ominous, and just plain strange. In fact, this is author Blaine Harden's second visit to deliriously Orwellian country in three years, following his remarkable 2012 book, Escape from Camp 14. This second effort is also well worth the trip. Relying on declassified documents and interviews, Harden applies his journalistic acumen to the task of tracking two pivotal players at the dawn of the Kim regime. On one side is Kim Il Sung, rising from his origins as a scrappy guerrilla insurgent to become the self-appointed "Great Leader" who brazenly, sometimes incompetently, pitted a triumvirate of superpowers against each other on the Korean peninsula. Harden exposes Kim's shadowy, contentious relationships with Stalin and Mao, both of whom underestimated the budding tyrant's recklessness--while overestimating his martial talent--in their game of global chess. On the other side is No Kum Sok, a young fighter pilot who silently labors as a secret traitor, patiently biding his time reciting state pabulum and waiting for the main chance to make a high-stakes flight for the south. The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot expertly melds geopolitics with personal struggle, creating an exciting and illuminating account of a chapter of world history that still resonates today. --Jon Foro