Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick » I had this book on my hands in 2010, when a South-Korean friend told me Nothing to Envy “opened her eyes” about the neighbours’ situation - if she liked it, the book must be really good, I thought. However, days after, very embarassed, she asked the book back - apparently, it belonged to her landlord, and they asked the book back. Ok. So it was on my wishlist since then.
The morning I woke up and found out about Kim Jong-Il’s dead, I clicked on the “reserve” button on the library’s website. I was the 3rd on the queue!
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I got the book quite quickly, before Christmas. And I was pleased to know that it stars with an intriguing point I read during the Kim Jong-Il’s dead coverage: how dark is North Korea!
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The eletricity supply collapsed in the country in the early 1990s, with the Soviet Union. For the author, North Korea is not an undeveloped country, but a a country that has fallen out of the developed world.
The book was launched in 2010. It says the government has big plans for 2012, everything would change in 2012. Certainly they would not expect for the loss of the “Dear Leader” - so what about it now, Kim Jong-un? A remarkable part of the book is about the starvation the North Korean people faced after the death of Kim Jong-Il’s father. Nothing to Envy won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2010.
