From the category archives:

Book reviews: memoirs

Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag

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by Philip Gowman on 3 December, 2009

in Book reviews: memoirs, Human Rights

Suh Sung: Unbroken Spirits – Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001
Original Japanese version, (Gokuchû 19 Nen, Nineteen Years in Prison) 1994

We are all familiar with stories reporting the horrors of torture and starvation in North Korean prison camps. What we can forget is that over the past decades South Korea’s history of [...]

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Book review: The Reluctant Communist

9 November 2009 Book reviews: DPRK
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Charles Robert Jenkins: The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea
University of California Press, 2008

“Our choices are what makes us who we are. Nobody knows that better than me.”
So ends the autobiography of Charles Robert Jenkins, the only American to spend most of his life in North Korea and get out [...]

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LKL Weekly Tweets, 2009-08-24

24 August 2009 Bong Joon-ho
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Congratulations to Yang Yong-eun on winning the US PGA golf championship http://bit.ly/2Jw6M #. “It’s not like you’re in an octagon where you’re fighting against Tiger and he’s going to bite you, or swing at you with his 9-iron,” Yang said through an interpreter. “The worst that I could do was just lose to Tiger. So [...]

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The Korean War: the Korean version

12 August 2009 Book reviews: History
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General Paik Sun Yup: From Pusan to Panmunjom
Potomac Memories of War, 2007 (original English version pub 1992)

Your typical book on the Korean War centres on Generals MacArthur and Ridgeway, on the landing at Incheon and maybe (if it’s a British account) the battle at the Imjin. It’s a war fought by Americans, with support from [...]

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Cry Korea

23 April 2009 Book reviews: History
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Jennifer Barclay reviews a contemporary war reporter’s account of the Korean war, “Cry Korea” (Reginald Thompson)

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Escaping North Korea book launch

17 March 2009 Book reviews: DPRK
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An account of the book launch of Mike Kim’s “Escaping North Korea” held at SOAS in March 2009

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Inheriting the gifts of grief

10 January 2008 Book reviews: memoirs
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Brenda Paik Sunoo: Seaweed and Shamans – Inheriting the gifts of grief
Seoul Selection, April 2006
I remember logging this book in my memory sometime in early 2006, having read some advance notice of in, I think, the Seoul Selection weekly email. I didn’t read the small print too closely, and confess I didn’t read the blurb [...]

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De profundis

26 November 2007 Book reviews: Foreign literature
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Cullen Thomas: Brother One Cell — Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons
Pan Books, 2007

A “powerful, harrowing and moving memoir”, proclaims the blurb on the back. “A Korean tear in the muscle round the ribs, a Korean hernia…” reads the selective quote. The cover design, a Getty image of hands grasping prison bars, the typeface [...]

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Guy Delisle: Pyongyang – A Journey in North Korea

17 November 2006 Book reviews: DPRK
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(Jonathan Cape, 2006)

An account of a three-month work stint in Pyongyang at around the start of the Bush presidency, this book is neither particularly topical (it’s taken some time to be translated from the original French) nor well-titled. But it sure is original. We’ve read travel accounts of North Korea before; we’ve heard about the [...]

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Susie Younger: Never ending flower

4 November 2006 Book reviews: History
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(Collins Harvill, 1967)

To describe this book as a memoir of a Catholic missionary in South Korea in the early 1960s, while factually correct, undersells it. Yes, the author is a person of deep Christian faith, but her work in Korea is more that of a social worker than evangelist. And her observations are those of [...]

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Andrew Holloway: A Year in Pyongyang

10 May 2006 Book reviews: DPRK
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(Aidan FC’s website, 1988)

Amid the pile of available reading material on the DPRK, is there room for an unpublished memoir, getting on for 20 years old, recording the experiences of a lowly “raiser” — someone who converts Konglish into English — in late 1980s Pyongyang? Definitely yes.
Though obviously not state of the art, it’s [...]

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Jahyun Kim Haboush (tr): Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong

17 April 2006 Book reviews: History

(California UP, 1995)

The style of this takes a bit of getting used to (and this is attributable to the original author, not the translator), but the content is gripping. This is the autobiographical writings of a Korean crown princess – wife of the heir to the throne – and documents at first hand the [...]

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Kang Chol-hwan: Aquariums of Pyongyang

16 February 2006 Book reviews: DPRK

(Basic Books 2001)

A harrowing autobiographical account of a young boy’s experience in a North Korean concentration camp. Essential reading.
Links:

Buy Aquariums of Pyongyang at Amazon

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