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4.48 AVERAGE
4.48 AVERAGE
The North Korean's story is heartbreaking, aggravating and fascinating. Demick's reporting is top-notch and important.
Barbara Demick had a good idea in writing this book- if she couldn't get around the travel restrictions to write a book about conditions in North Korea, she would interview as many principal witnesses of a particular city at a particular time as she could to make a snapshot of the place. She ended up focusing on the lives of six defectors and their families now living in South Korea. I read a lot of reviews saying that this was a page-turner that read like a novel, but it just didn't feel that way to me. This is DARK stuff, made all the more terrible by the fact that it is current events, not some blip in history to look back on. I'm glad I read it for the world it opened up to me, but it was a bitter pill. (edit May 2012: I had to go back and give this 5 stars from the original 4.This book has really stayed with me and taught me so much!)
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I was not excited to read this book, but ended up enjoying it... or at least finding it extremely enlightening and thought-provoking (hard to enjoy a book about human suffering). Thanks, book club, for making me pick up books I normally would not! I did not know much about North Korea going in, but have a much better understanding of the situation now. It is eye opening and a bit horrifying. The author does a great job of portraying ordinary life in North Korea through the eyes of former/defected North Koreans who have shared their stories with her. It reads like post-apocolyptic fiction and is hard to believe it is true and happening in the modern world. The regime and its complete control of the citizens is mind-boggling. The book provides this insight without seeming voyeuristic or sensational, however. It's slightly out of date, having been written in 2009, but is still pertinent and likely accurate, even with the new and ever-nuttier Kim in control. A recommended read for those who want a very approachable account of a current political situation.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Brutal, heartbreaking, and very well told. The author was an LA Times correspondent stationed in Seoul, assigned to covering both South and North Korea. She visited North Korea and was frustrated at the way the government there made contact with ordinary people impossible for foreigners, so ultimately she began interviewing escapees from the North who had made it to South Korea. She cross-referenced the stories they told her against each other and against any other sources she could find, and put together this portrayal of the lives of six ordinary people over a period of a couple of decades during which the paranoia, ineptitude, and cruelty of their own government caused the quality of life to decline so much that millions ultimately starved to death.
Demick finds the common threads connecting their lives with the lives of people everywhere - resourcefulness in the face of hardship, love of family, the romance of youth - and at the same time shows how different some of the sensibilities of that society are. She follows each of her subjects through years of growing desperation to the various points that led each of them to risk their lives to leave, and finally shows their often difficult adjustments to life in a hectic, free, modern culture.
One small detail sums it up: one of her interviewees, an intellectual young man, describes his astonishment, on first reading Orwell's 1984 after his escape to the South, at finding the society in which he'd grown up described so accurately by someone who'd never been there.
Demick finds the common threads connecting their lives with the lives of people everywhere - resourcefulness in the face of hardship, love of family, the romance of youth - and at the same time shows how different some of the sensibilities of that society are. She follows each of her subjects through years of growing desperation to the various points that led each of them to risk their lives to leave, and finally shows their often difficult adjustments to life in a hectic, free, modern culture.
One small detail sums it up: one of her interviewees, an intellectual young man, describes his astonishment, on first reading Orwell's 1984 after his escape to the South, at finding the society in which he'd grown up described so accurately by someone who'd never been there.
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
This book was really interesting. I enjoyed learning more about life in North Korea from people who lived there and defected. I liked the human interest stories that outlined the information about North Korea. It was a quick read. It taught me a lot about a relatively unknown country.