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Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world.

Up until the end of the Bush Administration, there was indifference to the North Korean suffering under Kim Jong-Il.

The accession to power in Pyongyang of Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il and grandson of Kim Il Sung, is a unique achievement in world politics.

North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim's ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man's offense of falling asleep in a meeting.

Fidel Castro for me is like a father.

There is a different future that is available to North Korea, if they choose differently.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

We are hopeful that the North Koreans can show a little bit more realism, a little bit more flexibility.

Yes, I don't believe that the inter-Korean relationship has, quote, 'deteriorated' since I assumed office. Rather I believe that the relationship between the two Koreas is entering into a new phase - a time of transition. And so I think that the North Koreans are trying to see what they can build with this, with my new administration.