Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea by Barbara Demick ✔✔✔✔✔

Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years, bringing to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded and an indiscreet comment can send a person to prison for life, and all his family suffer from generation to generation as a result. The book also follows the journeys of these six persons as they become disillusioned with the government and finally realize, only after they've been able to leave by way of China into South Korea, how their country has betrayed them.

Each chapter of this book begins with a small photo of life in North Korea. The first chapter shows a satellite image of North and South Korea taken at night, where South Korea is bathed in light, and North Korea is completely dark, except for one little dot at Pyongyang, the capital city.

I quote from the first chapter: "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......Even in parts of the showcase capital Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side."

The citizens of North Korea are living life as if they were in a prison camp. The eternal, un-ending search for food, even to scooping up mud from the docks, spreading it over a roof till it dries, so any little speck of corn or rice can be extracted, the teacher who feels guilty because she knows as she eats a morsel or two for lunch that she will see several of her students die from starvation, and who feels guilty because it doesn't bother her anymore - this is a gut-wrenching book, made even more horrible by the fact that the reader knows the nightmare - and the majority of them don't even know it's a nightmare - continues.