Book Review by George Kennedy
The title of the author’s latest book aptly describes life for North Koreans today: There is nothing to envy. Imagine the worst privations possible and you begin to visualize horrors that defy credulity.
The success of the regime there had been its remarkable ability to hermetically seal the population from the outside world – until the past decade. The cracks in the seal widened just a little as 100,000 North Koreans were able to escape and reveal some of the most totalitarian practices of any regime during the almost sixty years since the end of the Korean Conflict.
Demick’s interviews with six North Koreans read like chapters from a house of horrors, i.e., the extent of a famine that devastated a fifth of the North Korean population. The interviewees include all ordinary citizens who “fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival.” They were believers until they each discovered how they had been betrayed by a cynical regime whose only purpose was to retain power at any cost.
A natural instinct to survive compels each of them to commit acts from which they derived no personal satisfaction; daily survival was their only goal. This book made sense to me.
I lived in South Korea and counted among my personal friends Koreans who lived in fear of being kidnapped and returned to North Korea.
I do recommend Demick’s book for anyone curious enough to add content and context to what they reflexively dislike about a country that is of increasing global importance.
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. She is also the recipient of the Georghhe Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Price in international reporting.
