kmardahl 's review for:

Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

5.0

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This is a very readable book about the lives of six ordinary people who have lived through some rather extraordinary events and are able to tell their version of life in North Korea. The tales of the famine and the brainwashing are simply awful. You turn the pages and wonder how anyone could live through that. They were merely surviving from one so-called meal to the next. The way they decide to leave North Korea comes across as surprisingly undramatic. Oh, yes, it was dangerous, but there wasn't the cloak-and-dagger drama I had expected. That made it all the more poignant - why didn't more try to leave? And once across the border in China, why didn't they move as far away as they could as soon as they could. The depth to which they were brainwashed was incredible. I simply couldn't imagine it. Mrs. Song was so adamantly pro-North Korean for so long that I wondered what made her finally make the move to South Korea. It's the ordinariness of these people's lives that makes the story so gripping. As I sit in my comfortable home reading this book, I can't help wonder how many people are starving in North Korea today. I think about the side-effects of malnutrition an entire generation (or two) and how anyone could lead an entire country down such a path. When I read about the difficulties of the North Korean defectors in South Korea or the attitude of South Koreans toward the idea of all of North Korea opening up one day, I can't help but compare it to today's refugee stories in Europe. We who have all the opportunities at our fingertips simply don't what it is like to not have them. I don't know if this is a book that "all politicians ought to read" or what. I do think all ordinary people ought to give it a try.