Romanization of the Korean language has long suffered from a lack of a single, agreed-upon standard for spelling, which is why you will variously see “Kim Jong Il,” “Kim Jong-Il,” “Kim Jong-il,” and “Kim Chŏng-il” in the press and academic publications. The book at hand uses something of a mishmash of different standardized Romanization techniques. For names and places that will be familiar to many readers, such as “Kim Il-sung,” “Kim Dae-jung,” and “Pyongyang,” Revised Romanization is used. For names of people and places less familiar to the casual observer, McCune-Reischauer Romanization is used. And for those who aren’t acquainted with Korean, Chinese, or Japanese names, it bears pointing out that in nearly all cases (with the exception of a few, whose names are widely known and/or used in the reverse order, such as Syngman Rhee), Korean, Chinese, and Japanese names are written in their traditional order, with the surname first and the given name last.