The Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang looks like any other city book for savvy travelers. It’s crammed with luscious maps and photographs and formatted in two slender, easy-to-carry volumes. But the guide is really a kind of provocation, since it’s virtually impossible for citizens of democratic countries to visit the North Korean capital city, home to three million people, unless they enter through China and travel with a government-led tour group. And the city’s only sanctioned tourist destinations seem to be its bombastically over-scaled memorials, museums, and sports arenas. The book doesn’t offer up any obvious tourist attractions like shopping streets, historical districts, or grassy parks, but instead formidable concrete government buildings and apartment towers. Not surprisingly, estimates are that the city welcomed only a few hundred tourists last year. This is not Paris.

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