Marching Through Suffering

David Hawk:
Sandra Fahy's, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, makes an original contribution to the literature on the 1990s famine in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Subtly and sensitively, the author examines how people tried to cope with and make sense of their lives as they ran out of food in a society where words such as famine and starvation were taboo.

What emerges is a people-centered story, a tale that empowers rather than victimizes. It is, the reviewers unequivocally conclude, a harrowing but powerful read.

With its nuanced understanding of North Koreans and elegant prose, Fahy's work will certainly find a place on the syllabi of many future coures on North Korea.

Fascinating... An important work that helps provide a far more nuanced view of the complexities of life in North Korea than that found in the media.

If you want to know why the human rights agenda matters, read this book and be reminded how complexly damaging state-led deprivation and oppression can be.

Stephen Devereux, Institute of Development Studies, author of Theories of Famine and editor of The New Famines:
This book is an extraordinary contribution to the famine literature. Sandra Fahy's analysis of the North Korea famine draws extensively on her interviews with survivors, which gives this narrative a unique depth and credibility. These personal accounts lift the veil of secrecy and reveal North Koreans as real people with a healthily skeptical sense of humor, even in extreme adversity, not as mute shadow-puppets mindlessly manipulated by their dour leaders. No book I have ever read conveys the mundane horror of a famine so vividly, while retaining academic rigor and advancing our understanding of this famine's complex causes and consequences.

Victor Cha, Georgetown University:
Sandra Fahy offers a unique, penetrating, and informative ethnography of one of the most opaque societies in modern history. Few scholars have sought to understand the humanity that survives, and sometimes thrives in its own way, beneath the oppressive state structure—an important contribution to the expert literature, yet accessible to the general reader.

Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego:
Marching Through Suffering is a really moving book. It is partly the subject matter, to be sure, but it is also Sandra Fahy's sensitivity to what her subjects are saying and their psychological state. That is what ethnography should be doing for us.