Nothing to Envy Nothing to Envy

Nothing to Envy

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

    • 4.6 • 516 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a new afterword that revisits these stories—and North Korea more broadly—in 2022, in the wake of the pandemic

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
 
Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.

Praise for Nothing to Envy

“Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”The New York Times

“Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”The Wall Street Journal

“A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”The New York Review of Books

“Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”San Francisco Chronicle

“The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate

“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”The Philadelphia Inquirer

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2009
December 29
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
336
Pages
PUBLISHER
Random House Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
9.4
MB

Customer Reviews

Damir Galeev ,

Fascinating read

If you're as much interested in North Korea as I am, you will appreciate this book. Wonderfully written!

RuRuRe ,

Didn't want to put this book down!

From start to finish this is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book. The author paints North Korea in such vivid detail that I feel like I have been there.

VivaAmerica86 ,

Eye opener...

Brilliantly and interestingly written. Very Informative, I couldn't fathom how miserable life can be any where other than in Iran but wow...this beat anything imaginative to it.

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