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Category Archives: Book reviews: Travel

Jennifer Barclay: Meeting Mr Kim

29-Jul-08

Jennifer Barclay: Meeting Mr Kim

Summersdale Publishers, 2008 Stern(10,g) Jennifer Barclay went to Seoul with her musician boyfriend eight years ago with no fixed agenda other than a desire to get away from her job. Fortunately, while in Korea she took advantage of her free time to explore parts of the country which are not necessarily on the tourist route. This is not intended to be a comprehensive guidebook. Other travel books might have a theme – trying (like Clive Leatherdale) to get to all four points of the compass, or in the case of Simon Winchester, trying to follow the route of a famous traveller from the past. Instead, this a lively record of wherever it was that the author happened to go on her weekly escapes ...
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Tom Coyner and Song-Hyon Jang: Mastering Business in Korea

05-Jul-07

Tom Coyner and Song-Hyon Jang: Mastering Business in Korea

(Seoul Selection, 2007) Stern(9,g) With a title like "Mastering Business in Korea" the current book might well turn off the casual reader. But as well as having, as its title suggests, a business angle, it can also be used as a more general cultural guide. And because this is a practical book written by people who have lived in Korea for years and make a living out of advising foreigners on how to succeed there, even when talking about the most business-oriented of topics there are little nuggets which a generalist can tuck away for future reference. Such as. When recruiting a Korean locally, an employer is advised to gain the employee's consent to take a copy of his or her clan records ...
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Charlie Crane: Welcome to Pyongyang

05-May-07

Charlie Crane: Welcome to Pyongyang

Chris Boot, 2007 Stern(8,g) The new photo book on Pyongyang can be appreciated on a number of levels. Firstly, there's the literal level: it's a collection of well-taken photos, with captions provided by the North Korean Tourist Board. But like it or not, whenever you see anything in which the North Koreans have had a hand, you do not take it at face value. Their propaganda, their rhetoric, is something which is so at odds with our own world view that we immediately discount what they say. And dare I say it, we are tempted to take a superior, condescending attitude towards what they view as their major achievements in constructing their Juche paradise. So, on this level, enjoy the picture of the ...
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Guy Delisle: Pyongyang - A Journey in North Korea

17-Nov-06

Guy Delisle: Pyongyang - A Journey in North Korea

(Jonathan Cape, 2006) Stern(9,g) 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 bleakness, the depression ... but maybe we've never seen it. That's where this book scores, because it's rather a unique concept: a travel account in the form of a graphic novel. You can attempt to capture in words the gloominess of Restaurant Number One in one of Pyongyang's few hotels, but to have a picture of it is something else. The graphic nature of the book, ...
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Clive Leatherdale: To Dream of Pigs

17-Apr-06
(Desert Island, 1994) Stern(7,g) Valuable for its brief excursion into North Korea, but the author only managed to escape from his minders for a few pages. Well worth searching out.
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Simon Winchester: Korea - a walk through the land of miracles

17-Apr-06
(Penguin 2004) Originally published in 1988, but with a new preface for the 2004 revised edition. Uses the 1668 description of Korea by Hendrick Hamel as a framework. An extremely well-written book.
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