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4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
The content was good and I appreciate the stories within, but it jumped around A LOT.
This is a stunning book about life in North Korea. The amount of governmental denial and apathy towards its citizens is at times, unfathomable. Incredibly interesting read.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
emotional
informative
medium-paced
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
It was interesting to learn about the people of North Korea. At first I was getting lost in how all the stories together, when a friend explained that they don’t it made the rest of the book a lot more enjoyable.
I have had a weird obsession with North Korea for awhile now, and this is the best book I have read on the country. It offers such an in-depth look at the lives of average North Koreans and really paints the picture of a strange and isolated country in a way us lucky Westerners can understand. This is one of the best books I've read in 2019, and I will likely re-read it again in the future. The stories Demick has collected are just awesome.
This book describes life in North Korea after the Korean War. The history the author includes of the war itself was interesting, since all I know of the war is from John Prine’s “Hello In There”. “We lost Davy in the Korean War, still don’t know what for.” By this book’s description, that does pretty much sum it up. Powerful people in Washington arbitrarily decided to divide Korea at the 38th parallel, and 3 million people died in the war, and countless others have since and will into the future. Except for that, the book is just repetitive stories of a repressive regime told by defectors in the South. It’s an awful story, but after a while it gets tedious, and I moved on to a different book.