Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea

With the Olympics in South Korea this year, and us visiting southeast Asia, I wanted to learn more about the history of North Korea and it's people. I've heard the horror stories in the news over the last decade of labor camps, extreme hunger and the systematic approach to lying to the people, but this book goes deeper than that - by focusing on actual stories from North Korean defectors.

Some of the stories they tell are warm, like when talking about family and young love. Most are haunting, talking about the physical effects of extreme hunger or carts of corpses being removed from trains that died of hunger the previous night.

The escape process and the integration back into South Korean life is not easy either, and both have their own drawbacks which are explored in this book.

Chapter 1 opens with a haunting photograph: a night satellite photo contrasting North and South Korea. Much as we first-worlders bemoan light pollution, the alternative is so horrifyingly worse.

This is a sobering book. There are other basket-case countries around – Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, ... – but there's just something special about North Korea. Demick transports us there, using the words and thoughts of escapees to paint a bleakness that none of us will ever really be able to understand.

I particularly enjoyed the chronological layout of the book: instead of short bios of each character, we move with them over time, through bad times and worse ones. That was a good decision: it really helps the reader develop a sense for conditions in the country.