As food disappeared and jobs-through which D.P.R.K.

Demick meticulously outlines how North Korea’s floundering economic relationships with the Soviet Union-which had collapsed in the early 1990s-and China meant that the country, heavily reliant on foreign aid and imports, could not sustain itself economically by the mid-1990s. The bulk of Nothing to Envy charts the lead-up to and the fallout from the North Korean famine, known in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) as the “Arduous March.” A period of mass starvation that lasted from about 1994–1999, the famine stemmed from factors related to North Korea’s rocky, mountainous terrain and lack of arable lands, economic mismanagement, and a series of floods and droughts which the North Korean regime’s centrally planned system failed to respond to with any urgency or flexibility. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Known for her imaginative, novelistic expansions of her interviewees’ testimonials, Demick’s work has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Her books Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea are drawn from her reportage on both regions. In 2001, after a stint in the Middle East, Demick became the Los Angeles Times’s first bureau chief in South Korea, where she wrote about North Korea and interviewed refugees fleeing the regime for China and South Korea. From 1993–1997, she lived in Eastern Europe, where she served as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote extensively about the war in Bosnia and its aftermath. Barbara Demick grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Yale University and the Bagehot Fellowship in economic and business journalism at Columbia University.

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick