Reddit Reddit reviews Nothing To Envy

We found 9 Reddit comments about Nothing To Envy. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Nothing To Envy
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9 Reddit comments about Nothing To Envy:

u/pompeychimes · 12 pointsr/pics

They can and it is mentioned in Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. A lot of the factories there have been shut down during the famine so the pollution isn't what it was. It describes an (almost) romanticised depiction of walking around at night in pitch dark in areas that used to be bustling and developed. Such a strange mental image.


Highly recommend this book if you're curious about everyday life in North Korea.

u/LurkeyLurkason · 7 pointsr/pics

Anyone with any interest in the real North Korea should read this

Very Interesting and it shows just how bad it really is.

worth a watch too

u/BucketsMcGaughey · 2 pointsr/travel

Utterly safe for you, yeah. Not so much for the people living there. I'm reading this at the minute, it's just jaw-dropping. I mean, we all know it's a shit life there, but it's far, far worse than I ever imagined. Really recommend the book.

u/3danimator · 1 pointr/WTF

I have. I know all about the sea org, its nothing like living in NK and to suggest otherwise is an insult to north korean suffering.

For one thing, they can leave anytime they want. if they wanted to badly enough. For another, no one in sea org is eating bark to survive.

please read this book to get first hand accounts of how it was during the famine in NK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Envy-Lives-North-Korea/dp/184708141X

Its heartbreaking. Especially the classrooms of young kids getting smaller and smaller in number as more of them die from malnutrition and the teacher being too hungry to give them any of her meagre amounts of food and feeling guilty for the rest of her life.

u/InventedBeards · 1 pointr/pics

Wow, he shot the cover of Nothing to Envy, an excellent book.

u/KrisK_lvin · 1 pointr/MensRights

> i ask you to explain to me, how the average person has the required level of knowledge on politics to make informed decisions about who should run state?

It’s not necessary to explain this to you because the question is entirely irrelevant. It is a very narrow and parochial understanding of knowledge which becomes apparent if you reverse the question: How can any one individual, or small group of select individuals, have the required knowledge of the populace to make informed decisions about how the state should be run on their behalf?

The issue is not whether "the vast majority of people” have or don’t have "the required level of knowledge on politics” because they don’t need whatever this specialist knowledge is to have specialist knowledge of their own lives and families.

In fact, for that matter, specialist knowledge of the kind you are talking about is highly disputed, is not a well-defined object that can be learned or not and is the subject of endless debate - in a democracy at least that’s true. Under a dictatorship you can simply have dissenting voices silenced.

> … dictatorships are less pleasant but democracies are just as corrupt as any dictatorship its just far less obvious ...

That is absolute rubbish. I mean it’s not even a different point of view, just actual palpable nonsense.

The only way in which that statement could be true is if we were to extend the meaning of ‘Democracy’ to include countries like North Korea as they are named the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea or Zimbabwe or any other places which ostensibly have some form of democracy, let’s say Nigeria, but where corruption is absolutely rife and not even “far less obvious” but plain to see to anyone from the minute they wake up in the morning to the moment they go to bed at night.

The important point there from your argument is that the issues of corruption in the latter ‘democracies’ have absolutely nothing to do with the form of government they have, or who is in power at any one time, or whether or not the populace at large have what you call "the required level of knowledge on politics to make informed decisions”.

Corruption exists in democracies such as the US or the UK and so on. But so do burglary, murder, extortion, rape, riots, inequality and any number of other crimes and injustices. A democratic system is not a promise of utopia and was never meant to be.

You’re a student so you’re young and it’s fine to hold pompous and silly ideas for the sake of shocking older people such as myself, but if it really is the case that you have actually "done considerable research” into dictatorships and democracies, then perhaps you could tell me what your thoughts on. The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1: The Spell of Plato as I have to say your comments are rather suggestive of the idea that you think a dictatorship ruled by an elite class of selfless and benign philosophers would be just as good, perhaps better, than a democracy.

You could also, for instance, look at books such as these and explain where you can find anything comparable happening under a functioning democracy (and not e.g. those I mentioned before):

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World by Theodore Dalrymple

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot

u/leaf_onthe_wind · 1 pointr/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon

I would donate it to Liberty in North Korea. I think what they're doing is extremely important but not enough people know/care about the people of North Korea.

And keep some to fund me and my boyfriend moving to Korea when we finish our degrees because I don't think I could move in with his parents!

This book, or any of the books in my wishlist, if I were to win :)

Thanks for the contest!

u/sassy-andy · 1 pointr/television

A docu-drama based around Nothing to Envy, a fantastic and devestating book by Barbara Demick about six seperate people who esacpe from North Korea.

It would have to have the HBO treatment and cannot shy away from the violence, torture and emotional gravity of the situation - whilst at the same time not glorifying it.

There are six(?) escapees who are documented in the book, so a 6 - 8 episode, self contained series would be incredible