Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea
    Unavailable
    Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea
    Unavailable
    Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea
    Ebook421 pages7 hours

    Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea

    By Barbara Demick

    4.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE 2010 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
    What if the world imagined by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four was real? What if everything around you was black and white except for the red letters on propaganda signs? Where spies like Orwell's thought Police studied your facial expressions during political rallies to make sure you were sincere in your expressions and your thoughts? If you couldn't turn the dials of your radio away from the government station?In fact, there is such a place: North Korea, the only country not connected to the Internet by choice. Ruled over by a dictator, visible only in carefully controlled images, it's a mysterious, even sinister country. But it's also a place where 22 million people live, work, and dream of a different life.Journalist Barbara Demick spent a decade covering North Korea's strange politics and regulations. then one day she met a young woman defector, Mi-ran, who told her about growing up there; about the cinema she used to go to when the country still had electricity, and about the teenage romance which blossomed there.through Mi-ran's story Demick glimpsed another, more human side of North Korea.In Nothing to Envy, Demick re-traces the life of Mi-ran and of five other North Koreans, taking us into the heart of an elusive society. We see her subjects fall in love, nurture ambitions, and struggle with survival and betrayal. their stories form a haunting portrait of a bizarre society and the cost it exacts on its citizens.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateMay 1, 2013
    ISBN9780732292843
    Unavailable
    Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea
    Author

    Barbara Demick

    Barbara Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for the Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.

    Related to Nothing to Envy

    Related ebooks

    Asian History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Me, Myself, and You: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

      Apr 15, 2019

      In her latest novel, Rooney suggests that individual identity is actually a microcosmic social structure, made up of webbed relationships and collective agreements. The post Me, Myself, and You: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ appeared first on The Mi

      6 min read

    • Article

      Borderline

      Feb 20, 2019

      Borderline
      19 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Sep 9, 2021

      With regard to Nick Guitard’s letter pooh-poohing the possible existence of tiny aliens [FT405:71], I would like to make the following observations. David Bowie, may he rock on, once said that the Internet is like an alien being has landed and that w

      17 min read

    • Article

      Your LETTERS

      Nov 12, 2021

      Your LETTERS
      7 min read

    • Article

      QUESTIONS of TRAVEL

      Jan 12, 2020

      QUESTIONS of TRAVEL
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Legend of the Lost Pilot

      Aug 22, 2017

      XICHANG, China _ Almost everybody in Liangshan knows the story of the American slave. During World War II, it went, an American aviator crash-landed near a village. The villagers had never seen a plane before, and they'd never seen a foreigner. Some

      12 min read

    • Article

      Home Again

      Apr 26, 2019

      Home Again
      6 min read

    • Article

      Gay Day 1971

      Jul 5, 2021

      I remember my first time on the dunes very well. In Grade 5, my class slept over at the nature school on the Toronto Islands, deep in the woods on the inland ocean. Beside myself with freedom, I learned to cross-country ski and heard the coyotes at n

      4 min read

    • Article

      About Brooklyn, All of Brooklyn: The Millions Interviews Thomas J. Campanella

      Oct 16, 2019

      Deep‐south Brooklyn is the flyover country of New York City. I want to make people think again, and more deeply, about Brooklyn, all of Brooklyn. The post About Brooklyn, All of Brooklyn: The Millions Interviews Thomas J. Campanella appeared first on

      7 min read

    • Article

      Trump’s Got Mail: About Those Great Love Letters from Kim Jong Un

      Oct 11, 2018

      At a campaign rally in West Virginia over the weekend, Donald Trump alternated between bluster over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and starry-eyed musing over his surprising new relationship with North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. “We fell in love,”

      6 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jan 1, 2016

      Books
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Love Supreme

      Oct 9, 2021

      A Love Supreme
      5 min read

    • Article

      In The Footprints Of The Ancestors

      Mar 2, 2023

      In The Footprints Of The Ancestors
      11 min read

    • Article

      Mandela’s Cape Town

      Feb 1, 2024

      Mandela’s Cape Town
      8 min read

    • Article

      Paddling Through History

      Jun 15, 2023

      Paddling to DeCourcy Island is at the top of my summer activities wish list. The Southern Gulf Island region is steeped in thousands of years of culture and history for the Snuneymuxw, Stz’uminus, Lyackson, Halalt, and Penelakut First Nations. DeCour

      9 min read

    • Article

      Travel To The Edge

      May 18, 2018

      Travel To The Edge
      9 min read

    • Article

      Eugene Hutzü

      Dec 9, 2022

      Eugene Hutzü
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nothing to Envy

    4.5/5

    1,020 ratings104 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      "Nothing to Envy" is North Korean propaganda, it means they do not envy other countries since they are so superior. Of course from the outside looking in the saying is ironic, meaning exactly the opposite we have nothing to envy of them. This book is a braided retelling of about half a dozen North Koreans who defected and told their life story. It's pedestrian and personal, day to day life, loves, work, there's not much high-level overview or history. I was disappointed Demick didn't weave more general information about North Korea (other than the opening and last chapters), but the individual lives tell a different kind of story that is helpful in understanding what it's like to live in a '1984'. I came away understanding that NK after the death of "Dear Leader #1" in the early 90s has essentially failed as a state, but due to cultural reasons the people will never revolt. They can only raise about 60% of the food needed, due to geography constraints, so the population is literally dieing and atrophying, each generation smaller and weaker. An elite few at the top fatten off the majority like in a Medieval kingdom, it's unsurprising since Korea once had the worlds longest lived dynasty at over 1000 years. It's already lasted longer than anyone expected, and sadly most likely will continue for years more to come. The only ones to blame are the Koreans themselves, who put the needs of the state above the needs of the individual, for whom we have nothing to envy.
    • 4/5
      In this book, Demick immerses us in what it was like to grow up, live in and escape from North Korea. She does this by portraying the lives of six individuals and their families in the 1990's and 2000's. There is a lot of insight into why so many have put up with the regimes of the Kims for so long. The horrors inflicted on the North Korean people by their government are chilling, yet the indoctrination prevailing in their lives from birth caused many to believe that things are worse in the west.Millions died in the famines of the 1990's when most families were reduced to walking out of town each day to gather weeds and grass to make a soup for their daily meal. Factories closed down because there was no electricity or raw materials to run them. People died of starvation and from rampant epidemics. The development of a generation of children was stunted by prenatal starvation and lack of sufficient nutrition in childhood. Doctors were helpless to save starving children. There were also packs of children called "kochebi" or "wandering sparrows" left to fend for themselves when their parents died or abandoned them to go in search of food.Each of the six people profiled in this book ultimately made the difficult decision to defect to South Korea. We learn how they accomplished their escapes. Even when they arrived in South Korea their difficulties continued: they had to learn how to live in a free capitalistic society, which was not easy.This is an excellent book, and it reads like a novel or a series of excellent memoirs. I couldn't put it down while I was reading it. Even though it is almost 10 years old at this point, it did not feel out of date at all.Highly recommended.4 stars (maybe 4 1/2)
    • 5/5
      Barbara Demick interviewed about 100 North Korean defectors and made nine trips to North Korea between 2001 and 2008. Her notes in the back of the book give a glimpse of the tremendous amount of research that went into this portrayal of six selected lives of defectors. Each story of the lives is alarming for the living conditions, cultural restraints and the demands from the leaders of North Korea, Kim il sung, Kim Jong il and Kim Jong un. The real focus is on the lives of the ordinary people trying to survive. Their lives are very different from those in South Korea. From brainwashing starting in kindergarten to the constant struggle to find enough to ea.t The telling of the Great Famine by defectors is horrendous. It brings to mind the famines in China but unlike China, the people have not fully recovered. Many have had stunted growth from the famine in the 1990s and the food supply is still not good. There is tremendous pressure to keep your own secrets. If not, your own children may report you. Each person portrayed had tremendous obstacles and barriers to survival. The best part of this book was the finding the updates at the end of the book about the defectors. I highly recommend this book as a true picture of life in North Korea, the difficulty of escaping and then the final difficulty of adjusting to a completely different world than you have been raised in.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating and horrific. Demmick writes in simple journalistic prose (somewhat reminiscent of John Howard) about several North Koreans who eventually defect from a totalitarian land of chronic malnutrition and paranoia.
    • 5/5
      What an eye-opener!How have I been so naiive about what has been happening in North Korea all this time? Well, I'm so glad I downloaded this audiobook, because now I am very much more aware of events in this culturally isolated country. The opening statement, that Google Earth shows the country as nothing but darkness because electricity is not the norm in people's houses, was just a taster for the repression and struggles that the population has endured.Although I originally struggled with the Korean names, after a while I began to recognise people reappearing in this non-fiction account. Every one of them endured a battle for survival that progressively got worse and worse. Their imprinted visions of North Korea gradually started to crumble, as famine and detentions in the gulag became more and more prevalent.Although the author did manage to visit this closed country on a couple of occasions, her characters were people who had eventually managed to escape, and allowed her to interview them in the relative safety of their new homes. Their survival, however, had frequently been at the expense of other family members remaining behind, who would have been made to pay the price. The book covers the period from the rise and subsequent death of Kim Il-sung, in 1994, through the ensuing rule of his son Kim Jong-i, who has since died (2011), but was still in power at the end of the book. This was a period of time during which 20% of the population died of starvation, but the country refused to allow outside help. The attempts that these people make to try and live some sort of normal life throughout this time, is heartbreaking.A well told account of unbelievable deprivation and determination to survive.
    • 5/5
      A very human and nuanced view into the lives of North Korean imigrants.
    • 5/5
      I liked very much the book. Specially the fact that the writer put normal persons in normal situation to show everyday life in North Korea. The only point that could have made this book even better would be a more deep description about the Kim dynasty.
    • 4/5
      Nonfiction story of 6 defectors from North Korea. Well written journalism and history of the development of North Korea under a totalitarian regime.
    • 4/5
      Shocking, well written, I could not put this down.
    • 5/5
      Ever since North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011, I realized I knew little about that country. I had visited South Korea twice in the late 1980's and enjoyed the energy and unbridled enthusiasm for capitalism that I saw, but North Korea remained a mystery.Barbara Demick, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was assigned to Korea for several years, and found the North Korean enigma difficult to crack. Unable to get any North Koreans to talk to her, she changed tactics and located defectors from North Korea who had managed to escape to safety in South Korea. Her stories of the famine, the lack of work, electricity, transportation, clothing, basic health and opportunity, the lack of color and culture, the terror felt by ordinary citizens about anything and everything, the flourishing black market, the absolute lack of trust in anyone and the total control of "the party" over every phase of everyday life painted a very clear but bleak picture of the lives of North Koreans from the end of the Korean War to the present.She has chosen six different people to follow from their younger days in North Korea to their now settled lives in the south. Their stories of escape, capture, imprisonment, and final flight to safety through China was every bit as engrossing as the first part of the stories when we see how utterly awful life was for people with no hope. By detailing the process of repatriation to the south, through de-briefing, and a forced enculturation experience we are able to see how totally deprived the people of the north were. In the north, where most had never seen a telephone, they had no mail service, books, very little transportation, no writing paper, and basic hygiene articles were not easy to acquire. Even a top engineering school graduate had never used the Internet before he was able to escape to the south. Radio and TV (when electricity was available) was limited to a few pre-set and government approved channels.This is not a pretty or easy book to read. It is gut-wrenching, appalling, and frightening. It is also totally engrossing, and for me at least, very enlightening. I was so anxious to read it that I grabbed the audio book that was available at the library. I do intend though to get the print version, because there are illustrations that should enhance my mental picture of this 5 star report.
    • 5/5
      I admire the restraint in Demick's reporting: She lets the "ordinary lives" speak for themselves. Also appreciate frank discussion of the difficulties North Koreans can face adjusting to life in South Korea. A reminder that life under oppressive circumstances can follow its survivors in insidious ways. Chilling to think family of mine have lived (and probably died) in the conditions depicted here.
    • 5/5
      Working from interviews with North Korean defectors, author Barbara Demick constructs a harrowing, ground-level account of how North Korea descended into misery in the 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The book makes for fascinating reading, on a couple levels. First, she tells her subjects' stories well; you feel sympathy, concern, vicarious fear, and rare triumph as each of them makes their way through the last 20 years (and some eventually escape to South Korea). Second, Demick draws striking lessons out of the stories: generous people died sooner in North Korea's dreadful famines; many of the survivors did things to stay alive for which they now feel guilty, such as not sharing food with neighbors who later died; even in the midst of social collapse, love and friendship can blossom; even if the place you are escaping from is dreadful, it's hard to adjust as an emigre. I didn't find that reading this book tore me up emotionally, but it did leave me questioning our lack of a global capacity to save people from the colossally incompetent totalitarian regime that governs North Korea.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating and horrifying account of daily life in North Korea, told through the stories of six North Korean defectors. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Great! I was worried at points that the interpersonal drama would water down the picture of North Korea, but that never happened. The book is much more approachable than Bradley Martin's Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, and a great introduction to the bizarre world of NK. The best compliment that I can give the book is that I was at times genuinely worried about the survival of main characters, even though it was an obvious conclusion that they survived and escaped NK to tell their tales.
    • 5/5
      'We have nothing to envy in the world' go the lyrics to a song taught by Mi-Ran (she plays the accordion which is as we learn something that all teachers in North Korea are required to do because they are lightweight, cheap and music is a good tool for indoctrination) to a class of five and six year old children whom starvation has made look three or four whose attendance rates have ominously dropped down from 50 to 15.'If you look at a satellite photo of the Far East at night, you'll see a splotch curiously lacking light' this Barbara Demick informs us is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. In this darkness Mi-Ran and Jun-Sang can avoid the eyes of nosy neighbours by walking down the pitch-black streets unseen. Mi-Ran is from the lowest caste in North Korean society (beulsun - literally tainted blood) , her father was a soldier from the South taken prisoner by the North during the Korean War and with no hope of repatriation his family are forever condemned to the bottom rung. Jun-Sang is of an impeccable background and his good marks in chemistry mean that he has a future at one of the military universities in Pyongyang, the showtown capital of North Korea and a union with a beulsun would ruin his prospects.Demick follows the lives of six protagonists from the same town, Chongjin and through them we experience vignettes of life in a country that has become a virtual black hole of information. We hear of infrastructure shutting down as people are no longer paid for their work and where a much more productive us of time is foraging for food, first rations from the government, the dogs and cats in the neighbourhood, then rats and mice and finally whatever plants and roots that can be boiled to make edible. The scale of privitation is sometimes overwhelming but the book offers light at the end of the tunnel as the six escape to tell their stories.Although not every escape story is a success and China is all to willing to hand escapees back over to the Pyongyang regime where labour-camps and worse await their return.North Korea is often in the news for its sabre-rattling nuclear experimentation. What this book so brilliantly does is to pierce the veil of secrecy they have erected and give insight into the lives of everyday people and one has to wonder how this can exist still. Very compelling.
    • 4/5
      Non-fiction account of life in North Korea: living through the 90s famine, the ongoing hardships, and the varying success of a handful of interviewees who escaped and set up life in South Korea. Not for the tender-hearted.
    • 4/5
      This seemed like a timely choice of reading shortly after Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011. Barbara Demick, a Los Angeles Times journalist, has painted a harrowing picture of what life has been like in North Korea since the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic in 1948. Her narrative is based on interviews with several defectors from Chongjin, North Korea who told her their life stories and related the huge change in quality of life they experienced following Kim Il-sung's death in 1994. Up until then, everyone had a roof over their heads and sufficient food, but the famines of the 90s made what had been difficult living until then seem like ideal times. This novel was published in 2009, prior to Kim Jong-il's death of course, but of particular interest was the description of how the North Korean people reacted to the passing of Kim Il-sung, who had been considered as a god, due in no small part to the propaganda which is all-pervasive. It was easy to draw parallels between the images we saw in the news last month of grieving people in the capital. It was reported here that the images of grieving North Koreans had been staged, and descriptions of how people reacted to Kim Il-sung's death would seem to support this theory, but also explain the extent of the oppression of the North Korean regime on it's people. Fascinating, and of course, very troubling.
    • 4/5
      An infuriating, fascinating encounter with daily existence in North Korea in a city far from the capital, through the first-hand stories of six North Koreans from different walks of life. Based on facts gleaned from numerous defectors and extensive interviews with the main subjects, all of whom defected to South Korea, the book reads more like a dystopian novel than journalism, but maybe that's the only way to write about this strange, hermetically-sealed society.It's heart-wrenching to read not just about cradle-to-early-grave propaganda and famine, but the small details of life, in which a courtship can continue for three years before the couple even dares to hold hands, for fear of the political consequences of their relationship, or a joke about shoes can land someone in a labor camp.Who knows what the truth is about life in North Korea? But the author did an admirable job in trying to discover the truth, and present it without sensationalism. As one of the subjects stated, when he finally read "1984" after defecting, "Orwell had an incredible understanding of life in North Korea." No need to read dystopian novels, when you can read a lovingly-researched, beautifully written account of the real thing.
    • 5/5
      Utterly fascinating/horrifying story of ordinary people living in North Korea. Wish I'd written this review earlier when the details were still vivid, but I can say that I found it almost impossible to put down. Finished it off very late at night, reading on my phone in bed.
    • 5/5
      A confession: I've never had much interest in either North and South Korea. I picked up an old New Yorker Magazine and found an excerpt of this book and found it so riverting that I pedaled more and more slowly during my warm up and finally stopped exercising all together. The book chronicles the lives of six North Koreans during the time of the Great Strvation and how they managed to escape for new lives in South Korea. Any book written by a Westerner isn't going to have the insights of a citizen from Korea, and the author admits that she was a bit frustrated with her understandable inability to verify details from the survivors. And I wish the epilogue chronicling their new lives was longer. It is still, however, a riveting book.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting, insightful and heartbreaking, about five individuals and their families living in North Korea, and how they defected to South Korea, after the famine, and the culture shocks when they finally arrived there.
    • 4/5
      Demick relates the lives of six North Koreans over the last thirty or so years. Since all lived through the terrible famine of the middle to late nineties, these lives are hard to read at times, as family members starve to death, but by the same token Demick personalizes the experiences of ordinary North Koreans.
    • 5/5
      Personal stories of survival and sorry from one of the world's repressed state. Very informative and tragic at the same time.
    • 5/5
      This book was recently shortlisted for a National Book Award, and Demick totally deserves to win for her meticulous reporting on six North Korean defectors to South Korea. I didn't realize how little I knew about North Korea until I read this book. It is full of indelible images: the doctor who discovers that in China, dogs eat better than the people of North Korea; the two young lovers sneaking into the darkness, too frightened and too innocent to do anything more daring than holding hands; a wife watching her foodie husband die of starvation.

      Nothing But Envy is heartbreaking in places, but ultimately hopeful (although even the hope is tempered by the realization that so many people lost so many years they can never get back). It's a cliche to say that a nonfiction book is "as compelling as fiction," but I could not put this book down, and even after I finished it I was scouring the Internet for updates on the lives of the six defectors.
    • 5/5
      I decided to listen to this book on the way home before Christmas and, it being 12 hours long, it took me longer to finish it. First off, I want to say that the reader (Karen White) is fantastic. She made me care more about the people in this book more than I might have while reading it. She basically brought them to life in my car. There were times when I was crying while I was driving because the stories she was reading were so heart wrenching. Life in North Korea is hard -- think of the hardest part of your life you've had and then multiply it by 1000 and it's still not as hard as living in NK. Demick spent a long time (seven years, I think) living in Seoul and researching North Korea. She talked to many defectors and these are their stories. They are moving, thoughtful, harsh and loving. They can make you laugh and cry, but they will also move you profoundly. Her writing, combined with White's skills as a reader, makes Nothing to Envy one of the best audio books I've ever read. As with Escape From Camp 14, Demick's book ends unfinished, because the lives of the people in her book aren't over. They still have futures, people they love (inside and out of NK) and also because there are still hundreds of thousands of people trapped in NK. This is at once one of the most darkest and most inspiring books I've ever read/listened to. I highly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Well-written account of everyday life for people in North Korea. While my ignorance about the collapse of North Korea's infrastructure and the terrible famine during the 1990s can be partially excused by the fact that their own government works hard to conceal these things, I am embarrassed by how little I knew. The lives Demick describes are not primarily of downtrodden oppressed people who burned with the desire to overthrow the system or even to escape the system, but of people who truly believed in communism and Kim Il-sung and were bewildered by how wrong it all went. In this "information age", it was truly frightening to learn how isolated the North Korean people are with no access to information other than what is provided by the government, especially outside the capital. Unlike the students in Tianmen Square, these people have no Internet access and most don't have even state-run television or radio.Demick does a good job of showing how people adjust as things went from good to not so good to terrible. These are the stories of survivors & I am fairly sure that I would not have been able to cope with the deprivations and restrictions that these people faced. The ingenuity and resiliance displayed is amazing, heart-wrenching and yet uplifting...
    • 4/5
      This book chronicles the lives of several ordinary families from North Korea, first describing their lives there in detail in the North, then telling of their escapes through China and finally, briefly, of their new lives in South Korea. It is an amazing job of reporting. The author respects the lives and stories of the individuals who must have spent hours telling her of their past. Each story remains the person's own story while also adding to our knowledge of the bleak but mysterious world of North Korea.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating portrayal of life in North Korea and how people survive in extreme circumstances. Demick does a very fine job of showing the universality of human emotions and what is going on behind those blank faces that we see in pictures taken in North Korea. The last section about how defectors fared in South Korea were equally interesting. The qualities that helped them survive (and escape from) North Korea, also helped them, after a time, adapt to a completely new and rather baffling country.
    • 4/5
      Wow, do I feel fortunate being born among the American middle class. North Korea is living in another crazy universe. Amazing.
    • 5/5
      No matter how long I live I will never forget this book. The subject of North Korea and its government has long fascinated me and this is the first book I've read on the subject. From birth the citizens are brainwashed into thinking they are working for the betterment of "the fatherland" and that their leader thinks of nothing else but their well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 22 million people living in North Korea are unaware of the existence of the Internet and are stuck in the 1950s. Defectors to China and South Korea are flabbergasted by the modern world. A very sad but very enlightening book.