It’s hard to articulate what overcame me for the better part of yesterday, but I just couldn’t put down LA Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick’s latest North Korea (DPRK) tell-all, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (affiliate link).

First off, heapful thank you’s to those two Beijing journalism mavens Gady Epstein, of Forbes, and The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos for their assists on her work, which tells the story of six abject, fateful North Korean lives helplessly caught in the maelstrom of a rapidly-evolving dictatorial society-as-prison, and of their intrepid forays beyond the borders of the hermit kingdom as they push towards greener pastures down in South Korea, via the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The culmination of more than seven years of painstaking research, Demick shares with us the high-stakes emotional odysseys of these half-dozen souls as they move ploddingly through the confusing inconsistencies of their formerly stable, predictable lives, challenging the very Juche fundamentals in which they’d been inculcated since birth contrasted with the startling discoveries they encounter as they slowly gravitate away from the inexorable pull of their propaganda-infested lives, shockingly coming to grasp the criminal nature of an evil regime that is not only economically bankrupt by 2009, but also entirely dismissive of the rights of the loyal citizenry in whose name it purports to rule with an iron will.

It begins at the DPRK’s northern frontier with China, on the other side of the Yalu and shallow Tumen Rivers. Chinese and North Korean border guard couriers are paid off or bribed handsomely in advance by North Koreans seeking to abscond their country, who then safely guide them usually under cover of darkness or along scantily-patrolled sections of the 850 mile long border over to the Chinese side. In China, they find only a temporary refuge on their journey to the democratic south. On the PRC side, they are taken in by welcoming ethnic Koreans – citizens of China, technically – who can communicate with them in their own language and who feed, clothe, and sometimes employ them, getting them started with an RMB grubstake so they can earn enough money to pay the various snakeheads who proceed to find them false passports and other identifying documentation so these DPRK refugees can eventually board the 80 minute flight south to Incheon Airport and a free future within the world’s 13th-largest economy.

Once in South Korea (the “Republic of Korea/ROK”) they are given a limited form of asylum and fully-debriefed by the ROK’s intelligence corps to ensure they’re not North Korean spies or Chinese citizens of Korean extraction looking to profit on the $20,000 parting gift North Korean refugees are typically entitled to after a year-long absorption at a Seoul-area intake center. And then, they’re off. They begin their lives reborn, not quite insiders, not quite outsiders, though perpetually disparaged and ridiculed by a society that still considers them Communist greenhorns who should be eternally grateful to the South Koreans for coming to their rescue and yanking them out of poverty.

I learned many things about the two Koreas in this book. Corrective facts that firmly overlaid the pockmarked holes of limited information I previously had at my disposal before picking up this excellent book, which is sure to be a bestseller. Demick has a natural knack for flowing narrative style, that, save for a few repetitive sections in the story – given that this was likely composed over the course of several months, the mnemonic device was more of a signpost to the writer than a needed reminder to the reader (which, incidentally, should still have been caught by editorial) – made this the first time in the new year that I felt myself unwilling to put a book down. Thanks to Nothing to Envy, I defied sleep at the witching hour and it set me back a wee bit in the schedule this morning, but that’s the stuff great books are made of.

My takeaways?

Well, I’m certainly going to be paying greater attention to Demick’s LA Times dispatches from Beijing, and what’s more, I’ve just snatched up her first work, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, in order to slake one of my other obsessive research thirsts, dispatches from the Balkans.

Five on five stars from me on this one. No question.

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