Nothing To Envy - Book Review

This was a more research-oriented piece for my history class, but I hope you enjoy it—it was honestly a really eye-opening book, and I’m just grateful to have read it.

[Written February 21, 2014]

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009).

In the epilogue, the author points out that North Korea remains a mystery. Here is a country that, under one of the last remaining family dictatorships, has avoided an economic collapse experts predicted for at least 15 years.

North Korea keeps most of its citizens ignorant of the world outside while ensuring others cannot witness the impoverished conditions within. It’s a nation living in the past, avoiding the present, where life is hard to imagine.

Reading this book made me realize that North Korea is real-life proof that literary works like Animal Farm and 1984 are more than just fiction. However, there is some bias since Demick focuses on six defectors, leaving out the stories of countless others.

The book also gives limited attention to the failures of Western nations in providing humanitarian aid. Despite being published five years ago, it remains relevant and objective, offering a unique lens on life under a hereditary totalitarian regime where freedom and individuality are suppressed.

Demick’s work spans from her early visits in the 1990s through 2009. She recounts how, before foreign aid arrived, North Korea faced worsening conditions, with crimes, suicides, and even cannibalism in remote areas becoming disturbingly common.

Through these tales, I gained insight into a self-surveillance regime where private enterprise or dissent leads to prison, labor camps, or execution. The propaganda song refrain, “We have nothing to envy,” feels like a dark irony.

Demick’s narrative, woven with her expertise as an American journalist and Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, evoked disbelief, sadness, and gratitude for my own circumstances.

The book is well-written, expertly researched, and delivers a clear thesis. It presents a haunting piece of humanity’s history—a bad part of history captured in the best way possible.

While much of the world documents its struggles and triumphs, North Korea’s “hermit abyss” leaves its people without even the basics, let alone a recorded history. I can’t think of a better book to understand North Korea’s hidden reality in the 21st century.