From the category archives:

Book reviews: History

Michael Breen: The Koreans

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by Philip Gowman on 30 December, 2009

in Book reviews: History, Book reviews: Politics, Book reviews: other

Michael Breen: The Koreans – Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies
Thomas Dunne Books, 1998 & 2004

With a commendable dose of filial piety appropriate to the subject of his book, Michael Breen dedicates his work to “Mum and Dad”. Having lived in Korea on and off since 1982, maybe some of the [...]

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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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The epic stand on the Imjin

11 July 2009 Book reviews: History
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Jennifer Barclay, author of Meeting Mr Kim: Or How I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi, looks at Andrew Salmon’s exciting new book on the battle of Imjin River: To The Last Round (Aurum Press, June 2009)
To the Last Round by Andrew Salmon gives the most exhaustive account to date of what he [...]

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Max Hastings: The Korean War

25 June 2009 Book reviews: History
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Pan Macmillan, 1987

There are so many books on the Korean War, which commenced 59 years ago today, that it’s difficult to know where to start. One history which has stood the test of time is by Max Hastings. Clocking in at 35% fewer pages than David Halberstam’s recent well-received account, Max Hastings’s The Korean War [...]

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David Halberstam’s Korean War

10 June 2009 Book reviews: History
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David Halberstam
The Coldest Winter – America and the Korean War
718pp, Hyperion, 2007

The subtitle of David Halberstam’s magnum opus, The Coldest Winter – America and the Korean War, at first seems a bit unimaginative. But it is to the point. After all, without Truman’s decision to commit US ground forces, the whole Korean peninsula from Baekdusan [...]

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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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Korea Yearbook 2008

14 March 2009 Book reviews: Business & economy
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A review of the 2008 Korea Yearbook

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Donald Kirk on the late 90s financial crisis

19 January 2009 Book reviews: Business & economy
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A review of Donald Kirk’s 1999 book “Korean Crisis: Unraveling of the Miracle in the IMF Era”

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The Dawn of Modern Korea

20 July 2008 Book reviews: History
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Andrei Lankov – The Dawn of Modern Korea
EunHaeng NaMu publishing, 2008

This entertaining book has, paradoxically, taken me a devil of a long time to finish. That’s not because it’s difficult. It’s because it’s the opposite.
The book is co-branded with a series of articles that Andrei Lankov has been writing for the Korea Times since 2002. [...]

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A minjung history of Korea

18 June 2008 Book reviews: History
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Korea Historical Research Association (tr Joshua van Lieu)
A History of Korea
Saffron Books, 2005

It’s the 1980s. In Britain, leftist ideologues such as Red Robbo, Arthur Scargill and Derek Hatton had for years been railing against the government and the establishment using turgid language pilloried in satirical magazines, TV programmes and film [1].
Anyone who lived through that [...]

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West, Philip and Suh, Ji-moon: Remembering the “forgotten war”

8 February 2007 Book reviews: History
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The Korean War through Literature and Art
(M.E. Sharpe, 2001)

An interesting and approachable collection of papers addressing how the Korean war is represented in the arts of the different countries involved. Chapters address Korean film, visual arts, and poetry, and also how the war impacted the lives and work of six Korean novelists.
For the Korean visual [...]

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Carter Ekert and others: Korea Old and New

4 January 2007 Book reviews: History
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Carter J Eckert / Ki-baik Lee / Young Ick Lew / Michael Robinson / Edward W Wagner
(Ilchokak Publishers, for Korea Institute, Harvard University, 1990)

An ambitious book which aims in the space of 400 pages to encapsulate Korea’s history from Palaeolithic times up until 1990.
In a book of this nature it is inevitable that, at times, [...]

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Sea-Jin Chang: Financial Crisis and Transformation of Korean Business Groups

14 November 2006 Book reviews: Business & economy
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The Rise and Fall of Chaebols (Cambridge, 2003)

A welcome and very detailed examination of the history and structure of the Korean business conglomerates. The strengths of this book are manifold. First and foremost is the wealth of evidence sourced from the Korea Information Service which provides some raw data for some hard conclusions. And 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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Donald Kirk & Choe Sang-hun (eds): Korea Witness

30 October 2006 Book reviews: History
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135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm
(EunHaengNaMu, Seoul, 2006)

A tribute to the many foreign correspondents who have worked in Seoul, this book celebrates 50 years of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club.
The book starts with one of the first mentions of Korea in the Western press: that august organ, [...]

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