
Nothing to Envy
by Barbara Demick
Six ordinary North Koreans, looked at very closely.
For you if
you want to understand North Korea through the people living inside it rather than the regime running it
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Demick spent years interviewing North Korean defectors in South Korea, reconstructing their lives inside the country with a precision that journalism rarely achieves. A doctor. A teacher. Two teenagers in love. A factory worker. An orphan. Six lives across the famine years of the 1990s when hundreds of thousands died while the state insisted nothing was wrong. The most humane account of ordinary North Korean life ever published in English. The dispatch that refuses to let the regime stand in for the people. Start here.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North Korea • East Asia
- Voice
- An outside perspective on North Korea
- Topics
- north korean famine
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.


