November 2013 Host: Jennie
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by
Barbara Demick
Barbara Demick
Summary
This book
follows six North Koreans through their lives in the 1990s and gives the reader
insight into what it is like to live there on a daily basis. We become privy to details such as their
modest housing, the lack of heat in the wintertime, the many ways they came up
with to avoid starvation (such as milling bark and grasses), and how they had
to watch what they said around government officials or else be sent to a work
camp. When the Korean peninsula was
split after WWII, Stalin installed a like-minded leader in North Korea, Kim
ll-Sung, who eradicates religion and replaces it by his own cult of personality
and achieves a god status in his country through constant propaganda. Upon his death, many North Koreans committed
suicide. When the collapse of the Soviet
Union cut off their aid of food and oil to North Korea, they were unable to
maintain their electrical grid (on the first page we see a picture of the
Korean peninsula at night, South Korea has thousands of twinkling lights and
North Korea is pitch black) and millions starved to death (the army took for
themselves the aid sent by the US and UN).
The majority of the country still suffers malnutrition, evident in their
physical attributes such as being shorter than their relatives in South Korea
and having heads disproportionately large to their body size. This book is informative and will fill the
reader with disbelief and a renewed gratefulness for their circumstances; we
highly recommend it.
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Hot Toddies
Appetizers
San Francisco Salad
Mashed Potatoes
Barbecued Pork, Chicken, and Sausage
Pumpkin Pie
Chocolate Cake