Awful. I want to call it under-researched but it's more than that; it's meticulously misrepresentative and disingenuous.

Korean history is complicated, and North Korea is not a perfect nation. The North Korean government has made decisions that harm people, and their country has turned toward totalitarianism and surveillance especially in recent years. However, they are not a mindlessly evil dystopia plucked from 1984. There's a way to critique North Korea without leaning on sensationalism and orientalist framing. Nothing to Envy does not commit to this nuance with any integrity, dramatizing the often very real struggles of the North Korean people, essentially turning them into an exhibit for Western audiences to gawk at and feel pity for.

Demick includes every possible shocking fact you could ever think of, creating an overwhelming gish gallop effect. There is such a deluge of information, an endless amount of names and stories and statistics that run from one anecdote to the next. It positions itself as authoritative and well-researched simply because of the amount of information thrown at you, regardless of whether or not the information is fairly presented or not. It's incredibly difficult to tell where real experience ends and fabrication or exaggeration begins.

Despite its mind-numbing length and density, there's no historical context for anything that's happening. It's one thing to gloss over history for brevity's sake, and it's another thing entirely to pick and choose which contexts get omitted. It's a very intentional choice to craft a specific image. You simply can't write a book about North Korea without talking about its history in its entirety. It's impossible to understand how it exists as a country today without also understanding the historical context that led their government to make the decisions they've made.

You cannot talk about North Korea's foreign policy and crumbling infrastructure without mentioning how the United States systematically bombed North Korea during the Korean war, destroying 85% of its infrastructure and killing 20% of its population. You cannot talk about the famine of the 1990s and how it prompted an exponential increase in defection and emigration without talking about the nonconsensual splitting of Korea into North and South, which left the North with mostly unuseable land. You cannot talk about their lack of resources and trade goods without mentioning that they are the most sanctioned country on the planet.

Because of its calculated framing, the entire book comes across as extremely orientalist, purposefully. Every word is chosen very carefully to paint the most exaggerated, terrifying picture possible. Although Nothing to Envy claims to humanize North Koreans and show the reality of their everyday lives, what it actually does is paint them as stupid, clueless, and backwards; faceless masses that can't think for themselves, capitulate to an irrationally evil leader, and need the smarter, better, more developed Western world to save them.

To position North Korea as something uniquely evil, uniquely horrific, and inherently "other" is unfair and harmful. In attempting to "humanize" the North Korean people, Demick dehumanizes them even further. The sensationalism is so extreme that North Korean citizens can't even exist as normal people. Every single action they do is scrutinized and thrown under a microscope to paint them as brainwashed and pathetic. They pick herbs and greens from the mountains to eat and use as medicine? How backward and barbaric. They're trading their produce at a community market? How sad, they can't have real jobs. They're performing a song celebrating their country? Brainwashed, how could they be so stupid?

There's a certain kind of cruelty in the irony of writing a book that hinges on exaggerated messaging, while looking down your nose at a population that you dehumanize because you believe they are brainwashed and propagandized. You can criticize North Korea's leadership and attempt to humanize its citizens in a way that gives them the dignity of being a whole, complex nation with a rich culture, history, and complicated politics.

Demick has created what essentially functions as a complete compendium of propaganda against North Korea: cherry-picked statistics, anecdotes without context, and half-truths. It's not co-opting or supporting the North Korean government to place it within its complex historical context. It's not endorsing Kim Il Sung to try to understand the country with depth and clarity. It is, however, racist, orientalist, and manipulative to write a book like this and position it as an empathetic, humanizing perspective.

I think if I had started at chapter ten and was big on slice-of-life stories, I might have liked this. I can see how the literary monarchs might add this to the canon, and if I squint a little I recognize why some might regard this as one of their favorite books. I of course consider it rather boring, long-winded, and lacking focus.

This was my favourite book (next to the others from that series) I read last year. Definitely going to re-read it this year. Also the book that got me an apprenticeship