Review: Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick

 Nothing to Envy
 Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Author: Barbara Demick
Publisher-Format:Tantor Media, audio, 12.5 hr
Narrator: Karen White
Year of publication: 2010
Subject: Lives of North Koreans who defected to South Korea
Setting: various venues in North and South Korea
Genre: investigative reporting
Source: Public library


Ever since North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011, I realized I knew little about that country.  I had visited South Korea twice in the late 1980's and enjoyed the energy and unbridled enthusiasm for capitalism that I saw, but North Korea remained a mystery.

Barbara Demick, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was assigned to Korea for several years, and found the North Korean enigma difficult to crack.  Unable to get any North Koreans to talk to her, she changed tactics and located defectors from North Korea who had managed to escape to safety in South Korea.  Her stories of the famine, the lack of work, electricity, transportation, clothing, basic health and opportunity, the lack of color and culture, the terror felt by ordinary citizens about anything and everything, the flourishing black market, the absolute lack of trust in anyone and the total control of "the party" over every phase of  everyday life painted a very clear but bleak picture of the lives of North Koreans from the end of the Korean War to the present.

She has chosen six different people to follow from their younger days in North Korea to their now settled lives in the south.  Their stories of escape, capture, imprisonment, and final flight to safety through China was every bit as engrossing as the first part of the stories when we see how utterly awful life was for people with no hope.  By detailing the process of repatriation to the south, through de-briefing, and a forced enculturation experience we are able to see how totally deprived the people of the north were. In the north, where most had never seen a telephone, they had no mail service, books, very little transportation, no writing paper, and basic hygiene articles were not easy to acquire.  Even a top engineering school graduate had never used the Internet before he was able to escape to the south.  Radio and TV (when electricty was available) was limited to a few pre-set and government approved channels.

This is not a pretty or easy book to read.  It is gut-wrenching, appalling, and frightening.  It is also totally engrossing, and for me at least, very enlightening.  I was so anxious to read it that I grabbed the audio book that was available at the library.  I do intend though to get the print version, because there are illustrations that should enhance my mental picture of this 5 star report.

Demick was awarded the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in 2010.

Review: Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

Author: J. Courtney Sullivan
Publisher Format: Knopf (2011), Hardcover, 400 pages
.....also audio - Books on Tape, 17 hours, 14 minutes
Narrator: Ann Marie Lee
Subject: Irish Catholic dysfunctional family relations
Setting: Boston, Ogunquit Maine
Genre: fiction
Source: public library audio download

This is not a novel about Maine, although the gorgeous beaches of Ogunquit form a backdrop for most of the story. It is a story of the Kelleher family, Irish Catholics who hailed from Boston and summered in Maine.  The matriarch Alice, is a recovering alcoholic, tautly holding on to every piece of tradition and superstition she inherited from her family, the Church, and society in general. 

The story gives us a summer when three generations-- mother, daughters (and daughter-in-law), granddaughters-- come together in bursting clashes of culture, expectations and memories of unhappiness past.  This is a family that takes the words dysfunction and grudge to new heights.  Alice is a grande dame who is epic in her ability to ignore everyone else around her. Since her husband died, she has returned to her alcoholic past.  Daughter Kathleen, who lives (in the unholy state of sin) with her partner in California raising worms for their excrement, has vowed never to interact with the family or set foot in Maine again.  She comes however in response to her daughter Maggie's cry for psychological help in the midst of a crisis with her own relationship.

The apple-polishing daughter-in-law, who fawns over Alice in hopes of inheriting the compound, is a personality guaranteed to produce finger-on-the-chalkboard chills in all who must interact with her.  Each woman has a secret she is holding onto.  Each woman holds a grudge that is standing in the way of growing.

It's a dazzling, bold, deeply involved novel in which the characters are well drawn, the individual stories and secrets crawl to a rather transparent (to the reader anyway) conclusion.  It is summer reading at its best.   As an audio, it's very well done. If  had one gripe, it's that the blurb doesn't really match the story.  Just ignore the jacket and read the book.  I was actually able to get the audio before I was able to get the print copy from the library. It's one that is going into my permanent collection shortly.

No matter your preferred format, don't miss it!

Review: The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains

Author:  Nicholas Carr
Format: W. W. Norton & Company (2010), Hardcover, 276 pages
Subject: Memory, intelligence
Genre:Non-fiction
Source: Public library
Challenge: Support your local library

I can't remember who told me about this one (maybe the author is right, and I'm already suffering brain damage from too much time on the internet) but IMHO, this is one of the most important books to be published this year. I find it difficult to write formal reviews of non-fiction works that deal with scientific topics. I'm always afraid I will misinterpret or worse still, show my ignorance as I divulge in my reporting that I missed some horribly salient point.

Rising from an article the author wrote for The Atlantic (July/August 2008) "Is Google making us stupid?" Cass takes us on a trip through the mental history of thinking, producing ideas, and handing on those thoughts and ideas to others. He discusses oral tradition, early writing starting with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, and marches on to the invention of scrolls, and the Phoenician, Greek and Roman alphabets.

He progresses to examine the importance of the discoveries and use of paper, the printing press and the book, and brings us to the present with a discussion of the role of the computer, the World Wide Web and the "instant-ness" of search engines such as Google. He includes an excellent explanation of the the role of Google in its project to digitize every book ever written, and the impact that will have (both good and bad) on research. All of these 'tools of the mind' had an impact on man's ability to obtain, retain, and pass on information. Each era used those tools within a certain ethic.

Throughout all of this, he documents scientific studies showing how the human brain works with each of these 'tools' and how over the centuries, each new thought medium produced a concomitant change in our brains and how they functioned. He is objective, but does manage quite eloquently to let us know that he is concerned that our current state of constant 'connectedness' is becoming detrimental to certain types of mental activity such as 'deep thinking' and sites several studies and experiments to support his position.

Whether I agree or disagree remains to be seen. For now all I can say is "get this one" (or at least get in line at the library for it--the hold list here is already several long). It is clearly and cogently written, quite easy to read in spite of the technical aspects, disturbing and encouraging at the same time. Every parent, teacher, reader, librarian should become familiar with his theory.

He begins and ends by reminding us of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

I'm sure Mr. Carr would be more than happy to see his closing lines proved wrong. I certainly would.