A review by readingwithhippos
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

4.0

Spoiler alert: Things are really bad in North Korea, and have been for many years, thanks to a string of dictators who have cultivated a society previously familiar to me only from dystopian fiction. Demick points out early on that even though she was able to get clearance to visit Pyongyang, in order to get truthful answers about what life in North Korea is really like, she had to talk to people who had escaped the regime, not those currently living under its threatening shadow. Her narrative-style portraits of the defectors she interviewed are personal and powerful, never more so than at the end of the book, when she tells how each one got out of the country that had literally starved them into submission.

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