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rienthril's review
3.0
Fascinating accounts from North Korean defectors of life in their home country, but a lazy book, patched together from short Q&A pieces from its namesake blog. It’s fine, I guess, to just repackage blog content in a book, but this project could’ve been much more.
emilydinhtea's review
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Deportation, Death, and Violence
cmfarris's review
4.0
This book is presented in a Q&A format, as it's an extrapolation of a column. Broken up into several sections, the interviewer speaks to several North Korean defectors living in South Korea, England and America. It was a compelling read because it focused mostly on the daily lives of those people while living in North Korea - I really learned a lot about the average person and how living under a Communist dictator structures their lives, work, relationships, etc.
Somewhere in the book, someone makes the point that outsiders probably mostly think of the North Korean population as mindless, or zealots for the regime, but the respondents show that most citizens are relatively clear eyed about their political situation and wish for reunification with the South (if relatively naive about the outside world, although they all speak to the increase in outside media like music and movies making it's way into North Korea via smuggling). Something I learned was that the communist system essentially crashed within the country after the famine that plagued the country in the 90's - I knew about the famine, but the effect was that since the government all but stopped handing out rations during this crisis, citizens began trading amongst each other for goods and an impromptu market economy grew to meet their needs. This system has spread, and the government still seems economically crippled to the point that they cannot afford to force the country back into the old purely communist distribution system.
A quick and interesting read if you like human stories or want to know more about the inner workings of the DPRK from the perspective of average citizens.
Somewhere in the book, someone makes the point that outsiders probably mostly think of the North Korean population as mindless, or zealots for the regime, but the respondents show that most citizens are relatively clear eyed about their political situation and wish for reunification with the South (if relatively naive about the outside world, although they all speak to the increase in outside media like music and movies making it's way into North Korea via smuggling). Something I learned was that the communist system essentially crashed within the country after the famine that plagued the country in the 90's - I knew about the famine, but the effect was that since the government all but stopped handing out rations during this crisis, citizens began trading amongst each other for goods and an impromptu market economy grew to meet their needs. This system has spread, and the government still seems economically crippled to the point that they cannot afford to force the country back into the old purely communist distribution system.
A quick and interesting read if you like human stories or want to know more about the inner workings of the DPRK from the perspective of average citizens.
librosylagrimas's review
3.0
¿alguna vez han querido saber tanto de un tema hasta que terminan descubriendo hasta los detalles más pequeños e insignificantes y ya nada es interesante? bueno, pues así es este libro. hay muchas cosas nuevas e interesantes que aprendí sobre la realidad de vivir en corea del norte y sus ciudadanos, pero ya había un punto en donde se metían tanto en los detalles de la cotidianidad que aburría, como por ejemplo los chistes o lo que comían los perros. creo que había detalles que ya eran innecesarios pero en general me pareció bueno.
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