You can buy “Becoming Kim Jong Un” by Jung Pak here. 

As the subtitle of “Becoming Kim Jong Un” says, Jung Pak’s new book is “A Former CIA Officer’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator.” With that pedigree, it should stand out from the crush.

It is indeed good, and often better than other recent writings on Pyongyang and the peninsula. The bar is low, though — it’s the best of a bunch rather than an outlier.

The book does have explanatory power: we now know why the U.S. is so serially duplicitous and cack-handed in its dealings