Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Staff Review by Michelle Snyder:
This is one book that could not be considered an easy read.
Following six North Koreans over the course of 15 years, Nothing to Envy offers a haunting portrait of life in North Korea that few outsiders are aware of. Since few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders that follow them around with strictly limited itineraries, the only way get a sense of how ordinary citizens live is to rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.
In Nothing to Envy, those include a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. The existences that Demick describes are brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a prison camp for life, if not executed. Haunting first hand stories of malnutrition shockingly reveal the fact that during the time period of 1994 to 1998, it’s possible some three million people died from starvation. One stunned defector, upon sneaking across the border to China, realized that “dogs in China eat better than doctors in North Korea.”
People will find themselves putting this book down out of disbelief, outrage, thankfulness for their own circumstances, and heartbreak over a country that truly has nothing to envy.
This title and thousands of others are available to you through the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library System. Check us out, and don’t forget to sign up for your FREE Library card! 716-858-8900 or www.BuffaloLib.org.