A gripping, astounding view into North Korea through the lives of six ordinary citizens-an important story that has never been told before. The Washington Post - Stephen Kotkin As a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Demick discovered that the country isn't illuminated any further by traveling there. So she decided to penetrate North Korea's closed society by interviewing the people who had gotten out, the defectors, with splendid results…Nothing to Envy conveys the emotional riptides and overall disintegration of stopped factories, unpaid salaries and piled-up corpses.