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North Korea is so closed off to the rest of the world that Barbara Demick had to interview defectors who escaped to South Korea to learn what conditions were like in the North. She concentrated on six individuals from Chongjin, a northwestern city, who crossed a river into China and eventually reached South Korea.
They told the author about the famine under Kim Il-sung and Kim Song-il when thousands died. Industry stopped due to lack of power, workers were not paid, and monthly allotments of food ...more
They told the author about the famine under Kim Il-sung and Kim Song-il when thousands died. Industry stopped due to lack of power, workers were not paid, and monthly allotments of food ...more
Very well-written accounts of the lives of people who had fled North Korea for the South via China, by an American journalist.
It's clear that life must be very hard in North Korea but I couldn't help feeling that these people who had grown up in a culture where their lives depended on always saying the right thing to those in authority were bound to be doing the same thing here and telling the American journalist what they thought she wanted to hear. There's no suggestion that there might be an ...more
It's clear that life must be very hard in North Korea but I couldn't help feeling that these people who had grown up in a culture where their lives depended on always saying the right thing to those in authority were bound to be doing the same thing here and telling the American journalist what they thought she wanted to hear. There's no suggestion that there might be an ...more
While content was often difficult to read (though, yikes, that sounds so flippant of me to say; people are living through this, so the least I can do is witness it through reading), I couldn't not keep reading. The prose was effortless, with Demick's writing gentle and harsh in the right kinds of ways, and her reporting and analysis always clear. The book was structured smoothly, covering history, sociology, psychology, and political science, all through the lives of six North Korean defectors a
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Dec 25, 2011
Elizabeth Stultz
marked it as to-read
Dec 26, 2011
Iida
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Jul 19, 2013
mr. x
marked it as non-fiction
Mar 24, 2014
Anne
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Jan 11, 2015
Hadil Zawahreh
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Apr 23, 2017
Charlotte
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Sep 05, 2017
Anastasia
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May 15, 2018
Rebecca
marked it as to-read
Mar 09, 2019
Elizabeth Stultz
marked it as to-read
Jul 27, 2020
Dalton Babcock
marked it as to-read
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review of another edition
Shelves:
300-sociology-anthropology
Dec 03, 2021
KSVelArc
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
Shelves:
history,
non-fiction
Aug 31, 2021
Bell
marked it as to-read
