Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea

As someone who has had a great interest in North Korea for years, I ordered this book as soon as I had heard about it. The book will open your eyes (and your heart) to what is going on in this isolated country. Demick brings you as close as possible to everyday Korean life north of the 38th parallel with recollections from defectors. Stories of hope, struggles, nightmares and love, this book really does grip you from start to finish.

Given how closely shielded North Korea is from foreign eyes, this book is a master-piece in investigative journalism that is based around the actual life stories of a handful of refugees. In taking this approach several perspectives are brought together on the same horrors and this really helps to sketch them out in great detail, whilst also making it an extremely readable narrative. Moreover, you also get some powerful images that hit home the absurdity of the situation - the one that sticks in my mind is a doctor who realises that even a dog in a Chinese village eats food that is so far beyond her reach as to be unimagineable. The book covers the last twenty or so years of life in North Korea and describes how an already failing country managed against all odds (it is surrounded on all sides by shining beacons of economic development) to worsen the lot of its people and drive them to a post-apocalyptic life of famine. The collapse described is almost unimaginable and the sheer horrors are actually probably impossible to understand, but this book comes as close as is possible to fleshing them out. The grass-roots perspective taken makes this book highly accessible regardless of any knowledge of the subject and I recommend it highly.

a brilliant piece of work, which seeps determination and committment by demick to produce this. A sentimental and critical look on a country in our not so perfect world