Kim Il Sung ruled his country, North Korea, for longer and shaped it more profoundly than almost any other modern leader. He created a unique and seemingly bizarre and menacing political and social system, establishing a dynasty that has maintained it for two more generations. Yet he remains a curiously inaccessible, little understood figure, partly due to the closed and secretive nature of the state he founded. Michael J. Seth puts together what we know of Kim's life from all available sources and places it in the context of Korean and modern world history to make both Kim and North Korea comprehensible. He looks at the unusual circumstances that contributed to Kim's rise to power and at the early experiences that help to explain the directions he took his country. Seth examines his impressive early achievements and his later failures, which left North Korea the isolated, impoverished half of a divided nation. Kim was a charismatic and resourceful leader determined to reunify and modernize his country. But he pursued these aims with ruthlessness, egotism and extreme narrow-mindedness. Ultimately, his political inflexibility led to disaster.