Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

At the end of the book, "In the Shadow of the Sun" the author mentions some of the sources she used when researching the book.  One of them is this book.  When I finished that book, I opened my Overdrive app, and there, on the first page, was the book that I just heard mentioned.  I thought, "I don't have anything else to listen to right now, I might as well listen to this one."

It is a collection of stories by people who have defected from North Korea. Many of the stories focus on the time of the great famine in North Korea during the 1990's.  Some are about the wide spread starvation, and how people got by with only a few hundred calories a day.  Others are about how careful people had to be to not say or do anything that would bring them under suspicion.  The stories show how each of the featured people slowly came to distrust the indoctrination they had received their whole lives about their "Beloved Leader" and realize that life really was better outside of their homeland.  I enjoyed this book very much.  Since the author was telling stories about people's lives, it reads almost like a novel.  It made me very curious about how conditions are now, 9 years later.  (2009, 316 p.)