Once known as the “Hermit Kingdom”, Korea was first prised open by Japan in 1876; it opened to the West in 1883, and even today it remains a little-known country. Yet its distinct culture and history could not be more colourful or fascinating. Famous as one of the Asian Dragon economies, Korea has risen to … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 29)
The United States-South Korea Alliance: Why It May Fail and Why It Must Not
The alliance between the United States and South Korea has endured through seven decades of shifting regional and geopolitical security contexts. Yet it now faces challenges from within. Domestic political turmoil, including deepening political polarization and rising nationalism in both countries, has cast doubt on the alliance’s viability—with critical implications for the balance of power … [Read More]
East Asia Observed: Selected Writings 1973-2021
This collection brings together themes in East Asian history, diplomacy, culture and politics written by J E Hoare since the early 1970s. His writings derive from his training as a historian, from his time as a Research Analyst in the British Foreign Office from 1969-2003, and from his experiences as a diplomat in the Republic … [Read More]
Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of … [Read More]
Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is Believing
In the realm of international relations, there are seemingly few states like North Korea. Whether it is the country’s human rights situation, its precarious everyday life or its so-called foreign policy of coercion and nuclear brinkmanship, no matter what this ‘pariah’ nation says and does it affects the state and stability of regional and global … [Read More]
A Team of Their Own: How an International Sisterhood Made Olympic History
The inspiring, unlikely story of the American, Canadian, South Korean and even North Korean women who joined together to form Korea’s first Olympic ice hockey team. Two weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics, South Korea’s women’s hockey team was forced into a predicament that no president, ambassador or general had been … [Read More]
Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories
Korean writer Ch’oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. … [Read More]
Education and Social Stratification in South Korea
South Korea is noted for hard-fought competition in university admission exams, which are widely believed to determine one’s prospects and shape their takers’ entire lives. Long after graduation, do admissions exams still influence social circumstances? In this book, Shin Arita validates this belief with vast amounts of sociological data. He traces the mechanisms that show … [Read More]
Last Night, in My Dream (K-Fiction 032)
A narrative of hurt and repentance through the stories of three generations of women. In her author’s note, Jung says that she wrote this novel because she wanted to “tell a story about illness, money, and grace”. The novel tells the story of three generations of mothers and daughters, starting with the maternal grandmother, who … [Read More]
The World You Want to See (K-Fiction 031)
To face the real in a world full of fake news. The novel is set in a world where smart devices called ‘agents’ have become commercially available. As the title of the novel suggests, the Agent is a device that delivers only the world that the user wants to see, whether it’s pure, glorified, or … [Read More]
Emergence of Korean English: How Korea’s Dynamic English is Born
Emergence of Korean English explores the dynamic nature of emerging Korean English and its impact on Korean society, culture, and identity. This book challenges the negative stereotypes and stigmatization of Konglish and argues that it has been a great asset for Korea’s fast economic development. The fate of Korean English has been transformed in the time … [Read More]
Sociolinguistics of the Korean Wave: Hallyu and Soft Power
Samosir and Wee examine how the immensely popular Korean Wave (“K-wave”) also known as Hallyu is wielded as soft power through the use of communication for persuasion and attraction on the global stage. The Korean Wave refers to the global spread and popularity of South Korean culture, particularly its pop music (“K-pop”), serialised dramas (“K-dramas”) … [Read More]
You Call That Music?! Korean Popular Music Through the Generations
You Call That Music?!: Korean Popular Music Through the Generations provides a critical overview of the history of Korean popular music from 1920 to the 2000s from the perspective of cultural history. First published in Korean in 2017 by one of the best-known critics, Lee Young-Mee, this book is a timely and much-needed source of information on Korean … [Read More]
Transnationalism and Migration in Global Korea: History, Politics, and Sociology, 1910 to the Present
Contrary to the image of Korea as a largely self-contained country until its economy became global during the 1990s, this book shows that transnationalism has firmly been part of modern Korea’s national experience throughout its existence. The volume portrays Korea’s frequent transnational entanglements with other nations in East Asia and the West from the start … [Read More]
My Life as An Architect in Seoul
The second book in the ‘My Life as an Architect’ series, looking at the Seoul buildings that have shaped the practice and outlook of the celebrated Korean architect Byoung Cho. Since founding his practice BCHO Architects Associates in Seoul in 1994, Byoung Cho has built a reputation as the key architect driving the expansion of … [Read More]
Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo
Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness is the first complete translation in any Western language of P’ahan chip, the earliest Korean work of sihwa (C. shihua; “remarks on poetry”) and one of the oldest extant Korean sources. The collection was written and compiled by Yi Illo (1152–1220) during the mid-Koryǒ dynasty (918–1392). P’ahan chip features poetry composed in Literary Chinese (the scriptura franca of the … [Read More]