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Around the World in Books / North Korea
Astonishing Stories of Bold Escapes From North Korea
Ordinary citizens ate grass to survive and lived without electricity — until cloak-and-dagger intrigue helped them defect
This is the 17th post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books from 30 countries in the first 30 days of March in alphabetical order of the country names. Tomorrow: Oman
In Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick adapts the structure her writing teacher John Hersey used in his great Hiroshima, which tells the stories of six people who survived the atomic bomb. But she makes the form her own in a National Book Award finalist about a half dozen North Koreans who fled the hereditary communist dictatorship of Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il.
Demick, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, focuses on the early 1990s and afterward. Those were the years when North Korea “faded to black” after the Berlin Wall fell and the old Soviet Union ceased to prop up its economy. Unable to maintain its power grid, the country lost most of its electricity. People couldn’t watch television, read at night, or go to movies or restaurants.
