Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Demick • 2009
Devastation Rating
political prisoner North Korea totalitarianism memoir
Our Take
Demick traces six North Koreans from the 1990s famine through defection, reconstructing their lives inside a state that has perfected the removal of reality. The book's terrible gift is making the ordinary visible — courtship, education, the discovery that the outside world exists. The horror is not the camps but the totality. Everything was the camp.
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