Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition by Barbara Demick (EPUB)

Description

An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a newly updated afterword by the author NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.Praise for Nothing to Envy“Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times “Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”—The New York Review of Books “Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate “At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐North Korea and Cuba were the first countries to lose oil, the lifeblood of civilization. Since we will all share that fate, it’s interesting to see what happened, though keep in mind that how severe the consequences are will depend on the carrying capacity of the region you’re in (1), how much civil order can be maintained, and the effectiveness of the leaders in power (i.e. see “Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” that compares California to Cuba).There are enormous differences between the fates of Cuba and North Korea. Cuba had many advantages — a benign climate with year-round rainfall where three crops a year could be grown, a culture of helping one another out, and Castro prevented middlemen and speculators from charging astronomical amounts for food. For a detailed understanding of what happened in Cuba read the Oxfam analysis “Cuba: Going Against the Grain”North Korea couldn’t be more opposite – a cold mountainous nation with only 15% of its land arable, and dictators so crazy and cruel they’re almost unmatched in history. North Korea might be the only nation with more prisoners per capita than America. There are many kinds of prisons, from detention centers to hard-labor camps, to gulags where your children, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents would also be sent to for a crime you committed for generations to come. About 1% of the population- 200,000 people -permanently work in labor camps. The threat of these prisons has made it impossible for organized resistance to happen.It’s hard to escape, and if you do, then your relatives end up labor camps. Other nations aren’t keen on refugees – South Korea fears a collapse of North Korea and being overrun by 23 million people seeking food and shelter, and China has their own problems with 1.2 billion poor people.The consequences of peak energy in North Korea are worse than what’s likely to happen initially in America, though some regions of the United States are likely to suffer more than others. On the other hand, when times get hard, group-oriented cultures that depend on a large network of people tend to do better than highly individualist cultures, which is as you can learn more about in Dmitry Orlov’s Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (2).The only good aspect I could find about North Korea was that the women there are less repressed than in the past. A century ago Korean women were so completely covered in clothing that the Taliban would find no faults. In one village north of Pyongyang women wore 7 foot long, 5 feet broad and 3 feet deep wicker hat constructions that kept women hidden from head to toe. Perhaps even more than Muslim women Korean women were imprisoned in family compounds and could only leave at special times when the streets were cleared of men. One historian said that Korean women were “very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely than women of any other nation”.After the Korean War ended, North Korea lost most of its infrastructure and 70% of its housing. It was amazing that Kim Il-sung managed to create a Spartan economy where most were sheltered and clothed, had electricity, and few were illiterate. Grain and other foods were distributed as well. In autumn each family got about 150 pounds of cabbage per person to make kimchi, which was stored in tall earthen jars buried the garden so they would stay cold but not freeze and hidden from thieves.North Korea became utterly dependent on the kindness of other countries for oil, food, fertilizer, vehicles, and so on.What happens when the oil stops flowing?In the early 1990s North Korea suffered a double blow at a time when they were $10 billion in debt. China wanted cash up front for fuel and food while at the same time the Soviet Union demanded the much higher price of what oil was selling for on world marketsThe nation spun into a crash. Without oil and raw materials the factories shut down. With no exports, there was no money to buy fuel and food with. Electric plants shut, irrigation systems stopped running, and coal couldn’t be mined. The results were: Power stations and the electric grid rusted beyond fixing The lights went out. Running water stopped so most went to a public pump to get water Electric trams operated infrequently People climbed utility poles to steal pieces of copper wire to barter for food There were few motor vehicles And few tractors, farming was done with oxen dragging plowsHunger struck, which made people too exhausted to work long at the few factories and farms that were still surviving.Oil is liquid muscle. One barrel of crude oil (42-gallons) has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. It would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal one barrel of oil.Perhaps this is why many nations have had no choice but to rely on muscle power after an economic crash or during a war, which means putting many people to work on farms. After the energy crisis, North Koreans over 11 were sent out to the country to plant rice, haul soil, spray pesticides, and weed. This was called “volunteer work”. Now that they couldn’t afford to buy fertilizer, every family was expected to provide a human bucketful of excrement to a warehouse miles away. The bucket was exchanged for a chit that could be traded for food.Like Mao’s crazy schemes (3), North Korea’s dictators lurched from one mad idea to another — one day it was goat breeding, the next ostrich farms, or switching from rice to potatoes.Food staples were grown on collective farms, and the state took the harvest and redistributed it. The farmers weren’t given enough to survive on, so they slacked on their collective fields to grow food to survive on, making the food crisis even worse. In the end, it was people in cities with no land to grow their own food on who ended up starving first. Every year, rationed amounts of food went down.People were told the United States was at fault, and propaganda campaigns encouraged Koreans to think of themselves as tough, and that enduring hunger without complaint was a patriotic duty, and kept everyone’s hopes up by promising bumper crops in the coming harvest. The Koreans deceived themselves like the German Jews in the 1930s, and told themselves it couldn’t get any worse, things would get better. But they didn’t.Worse yet, instead of spending money on agriculture, the defense budget sucked up a quarter of the GNP. One million men out of 23 million people were kept in arms – the 4th largest military in the world.The only place to get food became the illegal black market, where prices were terribly high, sometimes 250 times higher than what the state used to sell food for.Natural disasters made harvests even worse – in 1994 and 1995 Korea was struck with an extremely cold winter and torrential rains in the summer that destroyed the homes of 500,000 people and rice crops for 5.2 million people.People began picking weeds and wild grasses to stretch out meals, as well as leaves, husks, stems, and the cobs of corn. Children can’t digest food this rough and could end up in a hospital, where doctors advised the rough material be ground up fine and cooked a long time. It wasn’t long before malnutrition led to increasing numbers of people with pellagra and other diseases. Hospitals soon ran out drugs and other supplies.Who died?Children under five. Mothers couldn’t produce enough breast milk, nor was there baby formula, regular milk, or even ground up rice. Children were the most vulnerable from poor diets. A minor cold would turn into pneumonia, diarrhea into dysentery.Then the elderly. First those over 70, then people in their 60s and 50s.Even men and women in the prime of their lives began to die. Men first because they have less body fat. Also, the strongest and most athletic because their metabolisms burn more calories.The most innocent. People who wouldn’t steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. The simple and kind-hearted who did what they were told. It’s said that the survivors of Auschwitz didn’t want to see each other again because they’d all done things they were ashamed of.Death was certain for people who didn’t have the initiative to do something.Chronic malnutrition makes it hard to fight infections, and people grow more susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. Once starved enough, antibiotics stop working, so curable illnesses become fatal. Hunger changes body chemistry to wildly fluctuate resulting in strokes and heart attacks.The city of Chongjin had always suffered epidemics because its sewage system let untreated feces into streams. Once electricity stopped working, running water became so unreliable that people stored water in large vats which bred typhoid bacteria. Between a lack of soap and antibiotics it wasn’t long before typhoid epidemics broke out.By 1998 about 10% of the population had died from famine, and in some areas 20%, up to 2 million people. The numbers would have been much higher if North Korea hadn’t received $2.4 billion in food aid between 1996 and 2005.The North Korean government began to execut people for just about anything: stealing copper wire, goat, corn, or cattle theft, anyone stealing or hoarding or selling grains on the black market, adultery, prostitution, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and so on. Thousands of people were thrown into prisons and many didn’t survive.Who survived?People did not passively die. When the public food distribution ended they did whatever they could figure out to feed themselves. Some made bucket and string traps to catch small field animals, used nets to catch sparrows, stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees and ground it into a powder to replace flour. Acorns were mashed into a paste. Kernels of undigested corn were pulled out of the feces of farm animals. Shipyard workers scraped the slime off the bottom where food had been stored and dried the foul-smelling goop on roofs to get tiny grains of uncooked rice out. Others dug shellfish out and ate seaweed. When making cornmeal, the husk, cob, leaves and stem were thrown into the grinder. Grass was added to make stews look like they had vegetables.People rested instead of moving around to preserve their calories.To stay alive, you had to suppress any impulse to share food.You had to stop caring, to be able to see a dead body on the street and walk on by, and not stop to help a beloved neighbor’s 5-year-old on the verge of death. Indifference was a survival skill.At this point, just about everyone looked at what they owned and could sell to get food. Usually within 5 years most people had run out of possessions to sell, and even sold goods that helped them survive like bicycles for transport or sewing machines to make clothes to sell.One of the most valuable items a person could own was a hand mill to grind corn, because there was no electricity for electric grinders. People would come for miles to have their corn ground manually.Some walked around the edges of their city looking for shellfish, birds, or berries, but most cities were concrete jungles, and people needed to go much further in their search for food. In the city of Chongjin families hiked 3 miles to a collective orchard to look for fruit that had fallen and rolled under the fence surrounding the orchard. As food dwindled, children cut school to go to the orchard and squeezed through the wire fence to get fruit. When there was no more fruit to be scavenged, people went further out from the cities looking not just for food, but for firewood. Farms began to hire armed guards.Children climbed walls and dug up vegetables and kimchi pots buried in private gardens. As the famine worsened, hungry soldiers began raiding people’s gardens as well.In smaller towns and villages, people crammed the narrow spaces between homes with peppers, radishes, and cabbages, those with flat roofs put pots of vegetables on top.Some raised pigs or made tofu. Many women made cookies because they only took 10 minutes to bake, a lot less time than bread, at a time when firewood and anything else that would burn was hard to find. Cookies made a quick meal for hungry people on the move. When many made the same goods, having the best personality counted.As coal and wood ran out, and electricity very rare, many foods people had made to trade for rice couldn’t be done anymore.Even dandelions and weeds grew scarce. Hot pepper, salt, and other flavorings that might have made weeds, ground sawdust, and inner bark flour palatable were expensive. Oil was unavailable at any price, making cooking even more difficult. It wasn’t long before North Korea’s frog population was wiped out by over-hunting. People ate grasshoppers, tadpoles, cicadas, and dogs.Many hung out at train stations, hoping to go somewhere better. The homeless began to live at the train stations, most of them children or teenagers, often because the parents and grandparents had starved themselves to death first to keep the children alive. Many orphans roamed fearing others would steal from them, or even eat them, as rumors of cannibalism spread. Train stations were a place many dead bodies could be found.Train stations also were full of prostitutes, often young married women desperate to feed their children. The only payment they asked for was food. Those with apartments nearby could get money or food letting prostitutes briefly rent out a room.Cities that relied on the falling apart roads and rail lines had to pay the most for food, especially rice, the main staple.Those with keys to abandoned factories dismantled them and made everything from the machinery to the wood doors into other sell-able products.Women made sneakers from discarded rubber, built carts from old tires and doors.Some found books on Oriental medicine and picked mountain herbs. Doctors performed abortions because families couldn’t afford babies.Food aid agencies did a survey in the summer of 2008 and found that two-thirds of people were still picking grass and weeds to survive on.Despite all the crackdowns on the black market, by 2009 there were some who’d made so much money they were becoming almost middle class. Kim Jong-il solved that problem by invalidating the currency in circulation and issuing new bills as a to confiscate the cash people had saved. The new currency was so worthless that the most money you could convert was $30, instantly throwing anyone who’d done well back into poverty. The economy crashed even lower, and starvation became common again.Supply chains broke downJust about anything you could think of grew scarce – there were no bricks, cement, glass, or lumber. When windows broke they were covered with boards or plastic. Supply chains were broken. One school, desperate for glass, devised a scheme to sell the famous pottery of their town for salt in Nampo, sell the salt at a profit, and use that money to buy glass from the only factory in North Korea that still made glass.A clothing factory that made uniforms started to have trouble in 1988 when shipments of fabric were delayed. Sometimes this was because there was no anthracite coal which was a raw material used to make the fabric (vinalon), or there wasn’t electricity at the factory. Management tried to keep the women busy by sending them out along railroad tracks to collect dog s*** for fertilizer. Other days they’d look for scrap metal along the tracks or in the effluent coming out of the pipes at the steelworks.How to be a DictatorIf you want to be a dictator this book is a good how-to manual. Kim Il-sung went further than most dictators by fostering a cult of personality that made him into a God so he could harness the power of faith by invoking religious sentiments in the people. He took the cult of personality to an extreme – everyone had to have a photo of him on a blank wall with nothing else, and use a white cloth that could be used for nothing else to keep the photo clean. Surprise visits of the Public Standards Police ensured this was the case.He also terrified everyone with the threat of going to prison.Children didn’t celebrate their own birthdays, only Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s, whose birthdays were national holidays and often the only time people got meat. After the energy crisis, these would were the only days when there was electricity, and children got about two pounds of sweets. Children were expected to stand in front of the portrait while enjoying their treats.Korean teachers are required to play the accordion to motivate children, or “voluntary hard labor” in the fields or a construction site.Further ReadingInside North Korea’s Environmental Collapse. Phil McKenna 06 Mar 2013. pbs.orgPfeiffer, Dale Allen. 17 Nov 2003. Drawing Lessons from Experience; The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba. From the Wilderness.References(1) energyskeptic Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level(2) energyskeptic Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union(3) energyskeptic Mao’s War Against Nature

⭐Many books about North Korea that I have read display the absurdity, pain, sadness, and blight existence of a nation gone rogue and gone wrong. Its blatantly obvious through these texts, histories, and other news outlets that North Korea is one of the most odd nations in surviving in a post-Communist world for so long at the cost of a miserable livelihood brought together by mismanagement, extreme repression, and an Orwellian control system. Testimonies, documentaries, and research, as well as visits to the low-key state bring about the same motifs of blind acceptance of their dear leaders, paradoxes in reality vs. what they are told, showcase capitals, and the true existence of North Koreans in the most heinous of circumstances all due to neglect. So coming to read “Nothing To Envy,” I expected another matter-of-fact, been there, read that book that re-hashed these themes. Instead I was truly surprised that Barbara Demick goes beyond her journalistic tendencies to create one of the finest works on North Korea out there. If I were to recommend a book to someone who has never heard of North Korea, or is curious about it, I would drop this book on them. Demick’s collection of testimonies of several recent refugees from NK, weaving them into a novel-like narrative, while dropping crucial information between each section of dialog and story, is one that she pulls off well and draws out raw emotion from the reader without getting throwing politics in it. Rather than Demick posing that North Korea is an evil state by giving her opinion like a sauce that she wants you to taste, she let’s the testimonies themselves let you decide what to think, and there were times I shuddered at their former life and became thankful for what I do have, and pray for the people of North Korea.What Demick does rightly in the beginning of the book is to lay her cards on the table of how long the book took to research, interview, and compile the information together. Also, she wisely says that though she has wholesale relationships and stories from the defectors, there are moments where she cannot corroborate them because obviously it is difficult to get information from within North Korea itself. Then she begins her narrative.She runs through several refugees and their former lives, mostly from the city of Chongjin which is right near the Tumen River on the Chinese border. Demick describes a young couple, Mi-ran, coming from a low-class of North Koreans because her father was a South Korean, and her boyfriend Jun-sang whose family had come from Japan. Then she later tells the tale of Mrs. Song, a woman who was a stout believer in the Communist regime to the dotted i. She thought that nothing could go wrong with their ‘eternal’ leader Kim Il-sung. There’s Dr. Kim, a petit trained physician with an iron will to do what is right. Demick describes these and others as normal human beings where they grow up and knew nothing else of their outside world and what they believed what was normal.In between each story and chapter Demick describes in more details/historical analysis of North Korea that gives background to each person’s existence, such as the Communist nation’s supposed equal status for everyone though they officially classify people based on their loyalty to the state, which has effects even on how much food rations that they could receive. Or what happened to Mi-ran’s father, a former South Korean POW, and what happened to these people of circumstance who were not allowed to go back home. She describes in great detail the political state structure that creates an environment of mismanagement, like the infamous collective farms or the post-war fall of Communist regimes that led to less support of the Korean regime. Demick balances a human narrative with a historical background so that you identify with the palate of emotions these people go through while getting the necessary information of understanding their circumstances.The book climaxes with the disastrous famine that occurred around the time of Kim Il-sung’s death and towards 1998. Millions died. Famine became noticeable when their food rations were cut. This is the most difficult part to read: there were moments I cringed on how hunger made people turn to beasts or opportunists at the expense of others. People of Dr. Kim’s profession, a noble one, were forced to hunt in the mountains and hills for food and medicine. Or watching young children die of malnutrition. At the same time Demick doesn’t write a section on blasting Kim Jong-il’s regime. Yet the horror stories of lack of food and the absurdity of the government’s “let’s eat two meals a day” paints the worst sin a government will be ultimately judged by: inaction and neglect. At this time the author puts in a new view of how North Koreans survived, and it was at times ugly and illegal (at least according to their law), but they managed to survive. She describes Chongjin’s citizens doing what it takes to trade, barter, or steal to put some substance in their bellies, even if it couldn’t be digested. The section about orphans who pick up scraps off the ground was heartbreaking.The final sections of the book describe the the eventual danger and migration of the refugees out from North Korea to China to South Korea. The dangers of crossing, checkpoints of getting across to another country and their repatriation laws, surviving to the dangers of exploitation, finally to the promise land. And even there our North Korean friends we read about have more gut-wrenching moments of regret in leaving their homeland and the culture shock that follows from adjusting from state control, “you follow me” to land of opportunity.Again, one of the best reads on North Korea to date. I enjoyed reading Demick’s writing style and putting together a story, not an informative, static, long newspaper article about North Korea. Its quality is renowned for good use of language, like describing the love story of Jun-sang and Mi-ran that makes you know that under the umbrella of repression and absurd rules, love abounds. How Demick describes how the darkness of night due to the lack of electricity proves to be the couple’s ally in having an innocent love.Sometimes its what we don’t have, or what we read others don’t have, that makes us appreciate life and moves us to change for something better.

⭐It’s one thing to read of the hermit kingdom of North Korea. It’s quite another to follow the lives of several ordinary people whose world was almost starved and tortured to death by the Kim dynasty. Following how these people survived the famine of the ‘90s, scrounging anything to eat and avoiding their own paranoid, incarceration-crazy government, the sheer courage and determination to survive leaves you both numb, angry, and awestruck. A must-read.

⭐Instead of doing a classic long-form review, I’ll keep it short.Demmick takes you through daily life in North Korea through 6 individuals who defected. But within those 6 individuals stories, you get an enthralling idea of what it’s like to live in the worst totalitarian regime in the world. It’s incredible. It’s maddening. It’s sad. And it should change your perspective on life.I couldn’t put it down. Do yourself a favor and order it.

⭐There really is a 1984 – it’s in North Korea.

⭐We are a shrimp among whales’. That is how Koreans have described themselves and for me it sums up the dilemma of Korea, a little country that existed for a thousand years and more in much the same way as China, but then became a pawn in other’s games. Did you know that the dropping of those nuclear bombs on Japan freed Koreans from 25yrs of occupation by the Japanese? I didn’t. As a boy I would hear about the ‘Korean war’, but it meant absolutely nothing to me. I was surprised to learn that 3M Koreans died as the US fought to make this little country an outpost of the West and stop it becoming communist like it’s neighbours Russia and China before reaching a stalemate and dividing the country in two. How strange it is, and what an amazing experiment, that all our most prized electronic possessions – from flat screen TV’s to laptops and mobiles – come from South Korea, made by people with the same history and genetic makeup as those in the North with such a different way of life!I’m so glad I found this book. It’s a gripping read. But it’s important to remember that it’s author bases it on the stories of defectors who ‘escaped’ from N Korea. We come to understand their backgrounds and their reasons, but not all Koreans want to escape (as the book also points out), and those who do are left with fond memories of their life in a place where the stars shine brightly in an unpolluted sky with no light pollution (no streetlights). Where, if you accept the system, there are a great many less things to worry about than we are used to. The defectors have their own grudges based on their individual backgrounds, but are they proof that the regime is all bad?There’s something wrong with the story we are given; some things that don’t ‘add up’. During the terrible famine of the 1990’s it’s shear lack of food that is the underlying problem. Then, when things start to pick up, we are given a heart-warming story of how everyone sets up as an entrepreneur, cooking biscuits, gathering firewood, cutting hair and so on, and it is the stirrings of small-scale capitalism that save the day. But cooking biscuits does nothing to increase the food value of the basic ingredients – no amount of work and cooperation can help people get out of a famine; the basic problem is simply lack of food. Some entrepreneurs start growing vegetables by creating terraced gardens, but how come they didn’t do this sooner? We have been told that N Korea was not always struggling. In the early years after the country was divided it was N Korea that had the best standard of living, and S Korea struggled – until the explosion of the consumer electronics industry there. What actually caused N Korea’s famine was not communism, or mismanagement, but a series of quite exceptional droughts and floods that damaged the crops; with little external aid. What rescued the situation was better weather and more foreign aid, especially perhaps from China as it found better times. It’s a pity that the peoples resourcefulness could not be directed into simply growing food by whatever means during the bad years, and I would like to have heard what was going on in the official farms and workplaces. The biscuit baking brings relief through profit, but only because there were people to buy biscuits who had money, and because there were basic ingredients to be had if you had money to buy them. Who were these people, in this poor region of Chongjin? Who were the men with money to pay for prostitutes? We don’t seem to be getting the full story! If they were simply the better off favoured classes who got better rations, then why was such trading not going on during the disaster? Are we being fed American propaganda regarding the wonderful power of capitalism to rescue people from famine?I’m left with a very interesting puzzle that seems to incorporates all the politics, tactics, wars and history of the world – what do you do if you find yourself in charge of a country that is ‘a shrimp among whales’, with borders against Russia and China, and Japan just across the sea? You value your country and it’s former ways, and understandably you hate the USA which killed so many of your people in order to create a Western outpost. You see the people of S Korea and the West with their own problems – overwork, stress, mental illness, drugs, pollution and so on, not to mention the breakdown of families that seems to be accelerating as children use Facebook and view pornography, while Facebook monitors the entire population, unchecked, to a degree never before known anywhere in the world! You see protests about the ‘one percent’ with all the wealth (N Korea, despite the injustices, is a much more equal society) Is there any way that you can preserve what you value while letting the people talk to, and be enticed by, that other, purely hedonistic, world. It’s a hell of a problem, and it goes a lot deeper than just communism vs capitalism or dictatorship vs democracy. If there is a way, I think it rests with education – a proper understanding of the good and the bad in both systems along with a questioning of what human beings are, and what they really want (evolutionary psychology is now giving us many of the answers). In N Korea, education is valued, and free, while in the USA school kids now live in fear of their lives. We need to understand both sides, and this book is a great start. How ironic that it won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize, yet the BBC tells us practically nothing about N Korea, other than that it is a ‘rogue state’! Now that I know the names of some places in that country, and their distinctive backgrounds, I’d love to see an honest documentary showing me the places and discussing the issues impartially. A sort of ‘David Attenborough life on earth’ but about humans! From what I know, Korea’s leaders would like this too, but understandably, they’re terrified.

⭐This book is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating insight into the lives of six North Korean defectors (unrelated, but all living in Chongjin) written by an American journalist Barbara Demick who has interviewed them and who kept in touch with them at regular intervals in South Korea to see how they’re getting on. The author has spoken to hundreds of North Koreans in the course of her career, but chose these particular individuals because she thought they would be more representative than people living in the capital Pyongyang.The first two thirds of the book describes their lives in North Korea (DPRK) and the last third describes how they escaped and their new lives in the south. First hand reports about N Korea are extremely had to come by, and while newsreader Ri Chun-Hee has become something of a celebrity in the west for her impressive declamatory style – she actually says next to nothing. So hearing from real people who can speak freely for the first time in their lives is fascinating. The overwhelming feeling at the end is that North Koreans must be amazingly resilient, resourceful and adaptable to keep going, despite living, as they do, in such dire circumstances.Life has always been hard in the North, but the famine of the 1990s killed at least one million people – around 4% of the population – and whole families were wiped out. An ill-advised policy of self-sufficiency (juche), propped up by energy supplies and chemical fertilisers from the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s with the demise of the USSR. leaving the DPRK isolated and frozen in time. In the chaos that followed, it was common for older generations to save their only food for their children who survived, but who were left parentless and with stunted growth. These young children are known as ‘wandering swallows’ (kotjebi) because they are constantly on the move looking for food and shelter.Following the misery of the early chapters – people having to walk for hours into the countryside to forage for grass and tree bark to eat – you think that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel when they risk everything to escape, but unfortunately their lives in South Korea are not always ones of undiluted joy either.Some adapt better than others, but they all find it hard to adjust to consumerist South Korean society in different ways. It’s overwhelming to be faced with so many choices when you are used to a government deciding everything for you. Some feel guilty about the family they have left behind, some of whom have been locked up in labour camps as a result of their relative’s defection, and some even feel a certain amount of nostalgia – they miss the sense of community that exists in the north because everyone was in the same boat – equally starved and poor. Some feel angry and defensive when their country is criticised by South Koreans, even though they hate the regime themselves. This is a difficult book to read, but an important one if you want to find out more about life in North Korea.The title ‘Nothing To Envy’ comes from a song that North Korean children are taught to sing at school.

⭐I am pleased I read this book which is neither fiction nor non-fiction but faction. We get interviews of several people who defected from North Korea to South Korea and the author fills in their back stories in a novelistic style. I learned that Korea was occupied by Japan for 35 years until the end of the Second World War when America and Russia, in their wisdom drew a line across the middle and separated North Korea from the South, a folly that was to lead to the Korean war. In 1948, Kim Il-Sung was imposed by Stalin as the supreme Communist leader of N. Korea and oversaw the invasion of the South. We learn how after the war ended, N. Korea’s economy surpassed that of its southern rival but from the 1980s it all went sour, electricity was turned off, factories closed, and over time, in the provinces, people starved to death. We follow four characters through to their escape and defection to South Korea.This is an easy way to get a foothold into North Korean history. I now want to read more about the impact of the Japanese occupation and more details about the cause of North Korea’s subsequent economic decline.

⭐Freak Out!: My Life With Frank Zappa

⭐It is difficult to imagine a country where the people are so controlled that they are not allowed to cook with electricity, watch tv programmes made outside North Korea, banned from the only smart city due to deformity, disability, dwarfism or special needs. Hell on earth? This is worse than anything I have heard about the hell mentioned in religious books.The innocence and bravery of the people of North Vietnam are deeply moving. The author tells how people she interviewed managed to survive starvation, brutality, snobbery and the crushing of their hopes and dreams.Communism for a fairer society? No! Communism is for the ruthless, greedy psychopathic slave masters to have a wonderful life at the heartbreaking expense of the poor.

⭐I picked up this book after Kim Jong-il’s death brought North Korea to my interest. N. Korea was always on my peripheral as an oddity of a country, but I didn’t know much more than that, which is what led to me buying this book. I did the usual of reading about online through various sites however wanted to sink my teeth in to the people of North Korea and this book did just that.It was gripping and I steamed through it in lightning fashion however that’s not to say it was an easy read. It gives you the knowledge you have, the big picture, and then will give you the harsher reality of that picture – breaking the already bleak illusion.A brilliant nonfiction which should be added to anybody’s list looking to try and understand North Korea and the people living there.

Keywords

Free Download Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition in EPUB format
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition EPUB Free Download
Download Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition EPUB Free
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition EPUB Free Download
Download Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition EPUB
Free Download Ebook Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 1st Edition