Politics: Trying to amass evidence to expose corruption, chaos and cruelty in a secretive country that limits access is very difficult for any journalist.
When that country is North Korea, the "hermit" state that has been virtually shut off to the outside world for generations under the tyrannical hand of the Kim family dynasty, the task becomes impossible.
My brief, two-day, highly controlled visit to North Korea as part of a media group accompanying an EU delegation in 2001 felt very surreal. Each journalist was assigned a minder and no one was allowed leave the hotel in Pyongyang unaccompanied. Our trips around the capital were closely monitored and set up, right down to showing us a group of "happy" children assembled on a street corner eating "free" ice-cream. The scene was meant to convince the western media that North Korean children were well looked after and content.
With the odds stacked against him, veteran China watcher and foreign correspondent Jasper Becker has tried to take us inside the world's most notoriously closed country to explain what goes on there and why its leadership behaves as it does. He takes us from the establishment of the Kim Dynasty with the rise to power of Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader", to the transfer of power to his son and North Korea's current leader, Kim Jong Il, known as the "Dear Leader". He describes vividly in places the brutality of the totalitarian regime, the eccentricities of Kim Jong Il and the plight of the North Korean people.
He portrays Kim Il Sung as both a monster, in his treatment of his own people, and as a puppet, in his close ties and search for guidance and support from the leadership of the former Soviet Union. His son Kim Jong Il would appear to have inherited his father's dictatorial style, and is widely regarded as an evil dictator who indulges his lust for foreign luxuries while millions of North Koreans suffer malnourishment and starvation. The book also deals with North Korea's devastating economic collapse, and Kim Jong Il's failed attempts at reform.
There are some startling revelations - the author explains, for example, that once a North Korean is arrested for the slightest act of disloyalty, something perhaps as trivial as not properly dusting a portrait of the Kims, he or she ceases to be treated as a human being.
Becker quotes Ahn Myong-chol, a former prison guard who worked in a gulag but who eventually escaped to Seoul in South Korea. He describes the "ragged creatures so short and crippled he wondered if they were human". He said on average they were about 4ft 11in, "walking skeletons of skin and bone".
In northern China on the border with North Korea, Becker tells of joining a hunt for refugees for whom the Chinese government was paying bounties of 60 cent. One refugee was found near a garbage dump. Becker describes how as the shopkeeper fished around in his pocket for some plastic twine, "a dirt-covered face scabrous with pellagra that looked about fifty years old shrunk back into the shadows of a hood made from grey sackcloth, like a medieval leper". The woman was in fact only 28 and had crossed the border in a final effort to avoid starvation.
Becker says the term "rogue state" is reserved only for the most incorrigible in the international system. "Rogue states engage in rash behaviour, subjugate their populations, are hostile to the ideologies and interests of the free world and most troublingly breach established international rules in many areas". On all counts, North Korea's leadership would appear guilty.
He estimates the Kim dynasty has brutalised its population for half a century, murdering or starving to death four million people in the process. Yet the Kims have "squandered precious resources on a religious cult devoted to their own worship while they have built palaces, swilled imported French cognac and gifted their concubines with Swiss watches".
The book does not break new ground, however, and a lot of the material is gathered from other written sources. It could also have done with tighter editing, and the author occasionally and frustratingly jumps from one era to another instead of moving smoothly from episode to episode. That said, the positive outweighs the negative. The author believes the solution in North Korea lies in the removal of the Kim regime but this is not a straightforward task. He suggests a new framework of international law that would legitimise the use of military force against rogue states such as North Korea. But this may come at a high price. In a chilling fictional account at the beginning of the book, Becker describes a chain of events that would be triggered by a decision to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea. He writes of an immediate act of retaliation - North Korea launching a deadly attack on Seoul in the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. Any concessions on nuclear disarmament by North Korea at the current international talks in Beijing would therefore be a major step
The book is never less than interesting and for those who wonder at President Bush's inclusion of North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" in his global war on terror, it provides up-to-date insights into the functioning of a regime whose deeds, even based on second-hand accounts, are truly appalling.
Miriam Donohoe is News Editor and former Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times
Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea By Jasper Becker Oxford University Press, 274 pp. £16.99