Like most people, I find history and politics more palatable when they focus on specific people rather than the sweeping ideas and dates of textbooks. Obviously, you need a balance, but if you look only at the big picture, you miss the innumerable tragedies and triumphs that are more relatable. This is one of the strengths of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010) by Barbara Demick.
Demick gives us a look into North Korea during the famine of the 1990’s through the lives of six North Korean citizens living in the isolated northern region–far from the tourist-approved Pyongyang. There is a rebellious daughter; a homeless boy; an ambitious student, a young school teacher, a patriotic doctor, and a loyal mother. As communism falls around the world, North Korea loses its much needed subsidies and support, and the economy falls apart. By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10% of the population.
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