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Reading about North Korean people is like walking on a tiny path through quicksand at night. Surely, there's some thrill to it, but one wrong step and you may end up checking whether the sand has any bottom. The pitfalls of such books are easy to point out - we associate ourselves with oppressed people, those who desperately want to run or those who have no say and no opinion, being stripped of their human traits. Some weird people find other meanings - how wonderful Juche is, whole politics of songun and society "unpolluted by capitalism". It's best to deal with books about North Korea the same way we deal with every other documentary or autobiographical work.
