Description
By (author) Demick Barbara
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WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world”s most repressive states – North Korea. ”A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea” Jung ChangNorth Korea is Orwell”s Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea”s third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country. Includes an updated afterword by the author.”Impossible to put down … helps restore humanity to some of the world”s most oppressed people” Observer
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A rare and valuable insight … Nothing to Envy is a searchlight shining on a country cloaked in darkness
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Barbara Demick”s achievement is to restore a measure of humanity to 23 million human beings. Many scholars have pored over North Korea”s atrocious history, its fearful politics, abysmal economics and blood-curdling propaganda. No writer I know has done a better job of clothing these academic concerns with the rich detail of the lives of ordinary people – explaining, simply, what it feels like to be a citizen of the cruellest, most repressive and most retrograde country in the world
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A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea
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This report on the lives of six of the citizens of totalitarian penal colony is unputdownable and deeply affecting, a worthy winner this week of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction
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Taking the cases of six individuals and their families, Demick constructs a harrowing narrative of the North”s slide into famine following the death of the elder Kim in 1994… The Kim dynasty, whose Stalinist cruelty Demick graphically chronicles, has shown remarkable staying power
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I loved it – I couldn”t pull myself away. This is the first book I”ve read which tells me about the inner lives of individual North Koreans and the universal cruelty of that regime. Reading this book, I”ve learnt something about how it feels to be North Korean – it”s not unimaginable anymore, but it”s even more painful than I could have predicted
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Demick weaves stories derived from interviews and conversations, conducted over a number of years, into a compelling narrative. Her book is a reminder that oral history is one of our greatest resources. Its use in Nothing to Envy makes for a valuable contribution to the literature on North Korea
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A fascinating study in the oral history of Korea in the last decade of the twentieth century … Nothing to Envy is a fascinating work which highlights in the lives of the individuals concerned the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity
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The shroud of silence and misinformation surrounding North Korea means these stories of six lives inside the Democratic People”s Republic of Korea, as told to Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick by “defectors”, are a revelation
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Barbara Demick, the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has occasionally been to the north, but on visits so strictly controlled as to be worthless. Talking with émigrés and escapees now living in the south has provided the material
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