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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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Item Description...
Overview
Follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years, a chaotic period that saw the rise to power of Kim Jong Il and the devastation of a famine that killed one-fifth of the population, illustrating what it means to live under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.
Publishers Description
A National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle finalist, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy is a remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens
Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
Taking us into a landscape most of us have never before seen, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, in which radio and television dials are welded to the one government station, and where displays of affection are punished; a police state where informants are rewarded and where an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.
Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors. Through meticulous and sensitive reporting, we see her six subjects—average North Korean citizens—fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we experience the moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.
Nothing to Envy is a groundbreaking addition to the literature of totalitarianism and an eye-opening look at a closed world that is of increasing global importance.
“The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick’s Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea….Elegantly structured and written, Nothing To Envy is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”–Slate
“Excellent… lovely work of narrative nonfiction….a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”–New York Times
“A deeply moving book.”– Wall Street Journal
“Superbly reported account of life in North Korea’’– Bloomberg
“There’s a simple way to determine how well a journalist has reported a story, internalized the details, seized control of the narrative and produced good work. When you read the result, you forget the journalist is there. Barbara Demick, the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief, has aced that test in “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at one of the world’s most dismal places.’’– Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The ring of authority as well as the suspense of a novel.’’– Washington Times
“Excellent new book is one of only a few that have made full use of the testimony of North Korean refugees and defectors. A delightful, easy-to-read work of literary nonfiction, it humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad that North Koreans are often compared to robots… The tale of the star-crossed lovers, Jun-sang and Mi-ran, is so charming as to have inspired reports that Hollywood might be interested.”– San Francisco Chronicle
“In a stunning work of investigation, Barbara Demick removes North Korea’s mask to reveal what lies beneath its media censorship and repressive dictatorship.”–Daily Beast
“In spite of the strict restrictions on foreign press, awardwinning journalist Demick caught telling glimpses of just how surreal and mournful life is in North Korea… Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state.”– Booklist
“A fascinating and deeply personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian regime of the Republic of North Korea… As Demick weaves their stories together with the hidden history of the country’s descent into chaos, she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys.”– Publishers Weekly
“These are the stories you’ll never hear from North Korea’s state news agency.”– New York Post
“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology. Demick… takes us inside the minds of her subjects, rendering them as complex, often compelling characters – not the brainwashed parodies we see marching in unison in TV reports.”– Philadelphia Inquirer
“The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real.”– St. Louis Magazine
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.
Chapter One
If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast- food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.
North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons program. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the U.S. sanctions. They can't read at night. They can't watch television. "We have no culture without electricity," a burly North Korean security guard once told me accusingly
But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with.
When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00 p.m. in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police.
I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learned to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was twelve years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighboring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas were operating because of the lack of power.
They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her older sisters, younger brother, or the nosy neighbors. They lived squeezed together in a long, narrow building behind which was a common outhouse shared by a dozen families. The houses were set off from the street by a white wall, just above eye level in height. The boy found a spot behind the wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. The clatter of the neighbors washing the dishes or using the toilet masked the sound of his footsteps. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself from the family. Stepping outside, she would peer into the darkness, unable to see him at first but sensing with certainty his presence. She wouldn't bother with makeup—no one needs it in the dark. Sometimes she just wore her school uniform: a royal blue skirt cut modestly below the knees, a white blouse and red bow tie, all of it made from a crinkly synthetic material. She was young enough not to fret about her appearance.
At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted.
Just outside the town, the road headed into a thicket of trees to the grounds of a hot-spring resort. It was once a resort of some renown; its 130-degree waters used to draw busloads of Chinese tourists in search of cures for arthritis and diabetes, but by now it rarely operated. The entrance featured a rectangular reflecting pond rimmed by a stone wall. The paths cutting through the grounds were lined with pine trees, Japanese maples, and the girl's favorites—the ginkgo trees that in autumn shed delicate mustard-yellow leaves in the shape of perfect Oriental fans. On the surrounding hills, the trees had been decimated by people foraging for firewood, but the trees at the hot springs were so beautiful that the locals respected them and left them alone.
Otherwise the grounds were poorly maintained. The trees were untrimmed, stone benches cracked, paving stones missing like rotten teeth. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, murky and choked with weeds, was luminous with the reflection of the sky above.
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.
by the time I met this girl, she was a woman, thirty-one years old. Mi-ran (as I will call her for the purposes of this book) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I had requested an interview with her for an article I was writing about North Korean defectors.
In 2004, I was posted in Seoul as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. My job was to cover the entire Korean peninsula. South Korea was easy. It was the twelfth-largest economic power, a thriving if sometimes raucous democracy, with one of the most aggressive press corps in Asia. Government officials gave reporters their mobile telephone numbers and didn't mind being called at off-hours. North Korea was at the other extreme. North Korea's communications with the outside world were largely confined to tirades spat out by the Korean Central News Agency, nicknamed the "Great Vituperator" for its ridiculous bombast about the "imperialist Yankee bastards." The United States had fought on South Korea's behalf in the 1950–1953 Korean War, the first great conflagration of the Cold War, and still had forty thousand troops stationed there. For North Korea, it was as though the war had never ended, the animus was so raw and fresh.
U.S. citizens were only rarely admitted to North Korea and American journalists even less frequently. When I finally got a visa to visit Pyongyang in 2005, myself and a colleague were led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung. At all times, we were chaperoned by two skinny men in dark suits, both named Mr. Park. (North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two "minders" to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed.) The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service. ("Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il" was a phrase inserted with strange regularity into our conversations.) They rarely made eye contact when they spoke to us, and I wondered if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed? Did they have enough food to eat? What did they do when they came home from work? What was it like to live in the world's most repressive regime?
If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left— defectors.
In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks. (A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.) The place is loud and cluttered, a cacophony of mismatched colors and sounds. As in most South Korean cities, the architecture is an amalgam of ugly concrete boxes topped with garish signage. High-rise apartments radiate for miles away from a congested downtown lined with Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Huts and a host of Korean knockoffs. The backstreets are filled with love hotels with names like Eros Motel and Love-Inn Park that advertise rooms by the hour. The customary state of traffic is gridlock as thousands of Hyundais—more fruit of the economic miracle— try to plow their way between home and the malls. Because the city is in a perpetual state of gridlock, I took the train down from Seoul, a thirty-minute ride, then crawled along in a taxi to one of the few tranquil spots in town, a grilled beef-ribs restaurant across from an eighteenth-century fortress.
At first I didn't spot Mi-ran. She looked quite unlike the other North Koreans I had met. There were by that time some six thousand North Korean defectors living in South Korea and there were usually telltale signs of their difficulty in assimilating—skirts worn too short, labels still attached to new clothes—but Mi-ran was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She wore a chic brown sweater set and matching knit trousers. It gave me the impression (which like many others would prove wrong) that she was rather demure. Her hair was swept back and neatly held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Her impeccable appearance was marred only by a smattering of acne on her chin and a heaviness around the middle, the result of being three months pregnant. A year earlier she had married a South Korean, a civilian military employee, and they were expecting their first child.
I had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong- il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure. Mi-ran had become a harsh critic of the North Korean system of brainwashing.
After an hour or two of such conversation, we veered into what might be disparaged as typical girl talk. There was something about Mi- ran's self-possession and her candor that allowed me to ask more personal questions. What did young North Koreans do for fun? Were there any happy moments in her life in North Korea? Did she have a boyfriend there?
"It's funny you ask," she said. "I had a dream about him the other night."
She described the boy as tall and limber with shaggy hair flopping over his forehead. After she got out of North Korea, she was delighted to discover that there was a South Korean teen idol by the name of Yu Jun-sang who looked quite like her ex-boyfriend. (As a result, I have used the pseudonym Jun-sang to identify him.) He was smart, too, a future scientist studying at one of the best universities in Pyongyang. That was one of the reasons they could not be seen in public. Their relationship could have damaged his career prospects.
There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 336
Dimensions: Length: 1.25" Width: 6.5" Height: 9.5"
Weight: 1.3 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Dec 29, 2009
Publisher Spiegel & Grau
ISBN 0385523904
EAN 9780385523905
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Availability 4 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 03:17.
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 | A window into a life that no one should live Feb 6, 2010 |
There a few books like this written today: concise, well-researched, plainly yet effectively written, and free of hyperbole. This book is a very personal account of six lives in the failed state of North Korea. The level of deprivation and humiliation these people endure is heartbreaking. The book reads more like an outstanding piece of social anthropology than it does cut and dried journalism. The author is to be commended for her ability to get inside both the hearts and minds of the people she has interviewed.
I think that Nothing To Envy is a landmark book, a study of a culture and political system gone horribly wrong, that will be read for decades. As the author notes, North Korea is the last of its kind, a state with an entrenched despotic, supposedly Marxist, leader who denies not only basic freedoms but also the basic provisions necessary to maintain any quality of life. Reading this book in the comfort of my own well heated home, I felt both pity for those that live in North Korea and anger for the inability of the rest of the world to do anything while North Korean's citizens starve to death. The impact of this book is both emotional and intellectual. I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned about the social welfare of people and the role that government plays in people's lives. | | |  | More please . . . . Feb 4, 2010 |
As evident by the length of reviews on this book already posted, this book about the North Korean regime and the ordeals of the six chronicled defectors is a worthwhile read and I don't need to summarize or highlight events in the book as others have already done so.
I'd like to make a few comments about the book from a Korean American perspective. Some of the details of their lives in North Korean struck a cord in me, particularly Demick's attention to the culinary culture of the Koreans. The detailed explanations of how they made Kimchi and buried them in terracotta or the process of making tofu from beans to the making of soup, reminded me that the North Koreans struck by the famine could easily have been my own mother, sisters, or brothers. In light of the culinary tie, it was especially difficult to read about their starvation and constant concern for where their next meal would come from. Further, Demick's treatment of the Confucius traditions that are so deeply ingrained in Koreans (perhaps more deeply ingrained in the North than the South who have given up many cultural traditions in recent times), revealed profound depth in the narratives of the defectors - their sense of duty to their parents and family - and further explained the twisted hold the Communist regime hand on the people (crimes against the state were often paid for by three generations of the family). Despite their constant fear of the Party and their meager existence, the North Koreans truly believed that things could be much worse and were likely much worse in the West. Nonetheless, it was not so much the ideology they questioned, but economics that finally broke the camel's back and drove them to China and subsequent defection to the South. And while they may have gained freedom from the regime, and a significant increase in their standard of living, I can't help but feel they have also paid the price of loosing some of their Confucius Koreaness as they are now displaced in South Korea, away from the world and family they knew and forced to acculturate to the West. I imagine the haunting memories and the continuing thoughts of the family they left behind makes them wonder if they are even free at all? What good is the most advanced cellular telephone if one cannot reach out to their loved ones? Do the fruits of living in the South make the past (and present) any more bearable? It becomes less about ideological defection, and more about having them face their own demons - the choices they made in their fight for survival. Moreover, their deep love for their "father" Kim Ill Sung cannot be simply forgotten. The Confucius tie of a parent and offspring, of king and subject, are not easily broken. The book reveals that mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, love one another despite any differences. They don't have a choice in that.
(BTW - one dying father's last words in the book - "mother" instantly brought tears to my eyes).
Why the three stars? Demick's work scratches just the surface and I don't think anyone should come away from this book thinking they are even close to a comprehensive understanding. She needs to press on and uncover the deeper wounds from both sides of the DMZ. I'd like Demick to go back, armed with these accounts of these defectors and delve deeper into the lives of the thousands of defectors living in the South, the constant watchful eye of the South Korean government, the cases of North Korean abduction of South Koreans, and the countless Koreans living in Communist China. There are more stories to tell from the hundreds of thousands, whose families are still torn apart. Further, I'd like the public to know more about the failures of the West in bringing humanitarian aid to the North Koreans and not be simply satisfied with the story of theses six chronicled. | | | | chicky chick Feb 3, 2010 |
excellent book. I could not stop reading. the words the characters were captivating and engaging. by reading the pages I felt I was no North Korea witnessing the famine, the death, the love, the migration. though the poverty stripped the North Koreans of their dignity, Ms. Demick was capable of showing the increadible resiliance they exhibited. Despite the death of loved ones and the continues pain they moved on and continued to live the best they could.
| | |  | A Nation of Prisoners Feb 1, 2010 |
Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy is probably the best account, for the layman, of the last two decades in North Korea. Demick has used her time as the bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times' Seoul desk to gradually gather enough sources to paint a portrait of the hermit nation. This book is the story of a few people from Chonjin. None are members of the Worker's Party, and each is now a defector. They include a shy scholar, a doctor, a teacher, a young woman from a family with Japanese blood, an older woman with a lot of community pride, a young man who learns to steal food in spite of his proud father's scorn. The title refers to the refrain of a patriotic song. "We have nothing to envy.." It is a phrase that lends itself to irony.
If I am honest with myself, I have to recognize the paradox posed by reading a book about North Korea. There is no doubt that the people of this nation are in peril. It deserves our concern. It begs for some kind of conversation. What can be done? It would demand that we understand why our existing political remedies fail to make a difference. Yet reading, by itself, falls short of action. If concern is the only response, then what does that mean? I am reflecting on my own culpability. I am a better reader when I am also entertained. I am concerned about NK, but I didn't pick up any of the human rights reports on this subject. It is much like the beautiful photography by Sebastiao Salgado of famine in the Sudan. We readily consume glorious reportage of tragic suffering.
A recurring theme is that survivors live only when they learn to put their interests ahead of anyone else. The young man lives, while his father starves to death in a train station. The schoolteacher watches her pupils starve, but she is not foolish. She doesn't share her meager rations with her students. When people have to work all day to put together 500 calories a day, there is little room to offer kindness to strangers.
The book has three parts in my mind. The first section attempts to offer some degree of sympathy for the country. She mentions that even if there is no electricity at night in much of the country, that means walks at night are uncluttered. The sky is lit up by stars. There is very little pollution. True....I suppose.
The next section goes into the grisly bits that underscore the larger truth: this is a horrible place to live. The people are living under a slow emergency. The country's leaders have given up any pretense that society is functioning. People spend their days scavenging for food. The eat tree bark, or sticks, or grass. The hospitals don't have electricity, let alone medicine. A character in this story acknowledges the truth - the country has become one large prison. Its citizens are hostage to the failed philosophies of its leadership. When the government admits that there is widespread homelessness in their paradise, they establish a series of community structures. Those structures turn out to be small jails.
In the last chapter, Demick departs from strict reportage and moves into some reflection with a fair bit of speculation. She reverts to using symbolic imagery. Swallows, for example, are the young children cast off from their families that learn to survive by stealing bits of food from the illegal black market farmer's markets. The economy's lack of energy can even be seen in how people stand. It is not unusual, she says, to see a large group of people setting on their haunches for hours at a time. They are conserving their energy. Besides, they don't have anything else to do.
I didn't understand that the implosion of this economy was predicated by the end of a ready supply of oil. North Korea could no longer look to allies in the Communist World with fuel (Soviet Union), because after 1989, they weren't there. North Korea had developed into an industrial nation. In Chonjin, where these subjects in this book are all from, huge mines and factories are silenced without oil. Even the coal mines, which should provide a ready supply of energy, won't produce without the oil needed to power the earth moving machines. This contributes to a lack of food, because most fertilizers require oil. Farming requires fuel to run machines.
Demick's book avoids layering the reporting with too much opinion. She lets the facts speak for themselves. Some of the details in this book are fascinating. For example, she explains why North Korean clothing has such a distinctly colorless look. It turns out that this is not an accident or a poor electronic reproduction. It is vinalon, a textile invented in North Korea that is made from a mixture of coal, limestone, and vinyl. It is often called Juche Fiber. Vinalon dies won't hold color, so it tends to be dark. Another oddity is the tradition of giving candy to children on the birthdays of Kim Jong-Il and Kim il-Sung. The rest of the year,they starve like everyone else. The Party uses the candy in conjunction with its other propaganda: Each home has pictures of the two leaders. The pictures are required to be displayed in every families, and they are inspected for cleanliness. It is front of those pictures that the children are given their candy. The association between their leaders and great benevolence is thus constructed. Details like these don't need any additional persuasion to make the main point.
Going back to my own ethical quandary, I am left even more uncertain about what the West can do to resolve this situation. North Korea's leadership uses our overtures of aid to generate aid donations. That food is not making its way to the people. The government uses what fertility is left in the soil to grow poppies for heroin. North Korea is supposed to be a producer of methamphetamine as well. It would be hard to imagine a country more deserving of regime change. Our aid programs seem to only delay the inevitable. Each day only serves to push more people into starvation.
Not everyone wants to know about a place like North Korea. I do, but I'll admit that I could find very few people who wanted to hear about the details that are within this book. I don't think that there are many better alternatives than this book. There is a famous documentary from the BBC, a series of academic journal publications, and the reports from human rights observers. Those have their own strength, but none can match this book for its ability to put this crisis into the context of the lives of North Korea's common citizens. | | | | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary lives in North Korea Feb 1, 2010 |
| this is a must read.The best most riveting book I have read in years.I don't usually read this type of book but i couldn't put it down til I finished it | | | Write your own review about Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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