From the publisher’s website: Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman’s Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula’s southwest coast. In this engaging ethnography enriched by extensive historical research, Kyoim Yun explores the prevalent and persistent ambivalence toward practitioners, whose services have … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 87)
Korean Skilled Workers: Toward a Labor Aristocracy
From the publisher’s website: South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s highly disciplined, technologically competent skilled workers who built these brands have become known only for their … [Read More]
Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era, 1961-1979: Development, Political Thought, Democracy, and Cultural Influence
From the publisher’s website: The Republic of Korea achieved a double revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. In just over three decades, South Korea transformed itself from an underdeveloped, agrarian country into an affluent, industrialized one. At the same time, democracy replaced a long series of military authoritarian regimes. These historic changes … [Read More]
The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture
From the publisher’s website: The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized … [Read More]
An Affair with Korea: Memories of South Korea in the 1960s
From the publisher’s website: In 1966 Vincent S. R. Brandt lived in Sokp’o, a poor and isolated South Korean fishing village on the coast of the Yellow Sea, carrying out social anthropological research. At that time, the only way to reach Sokp’o, other than by boat, was a two hour walk along foot paths. This … [Read More]
A New History of Korea
The first English-language history of Korea to appear in more than a decade, this translation offers Western readers a distillation of the latest and best scholarship on Korean history and culture from the earliest times to the student revolution of 1960. The most widely read and respected general history, A New History of Korea (Han’guksa … [Read More]
Korea Old and New: A History
From the publisher’s website: This full-scale presentation of the general history of Korea not only provides a detailed treatment of the post-1945 period, but describes at length the traditional historical–cultural milieu from which modern Korea has developed. This century has witnessed a multiplicity of both domestic and external factors that have resulted either in tendentious … [Read More]
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
From the publisher’s website: Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history. The Coldest Winter changes that, giving readers a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, … [Read More]
North Korea: Markets and Military Rule
From the publisher’s website: In this historically grounded, richly empirical study of social and economic transformation in North Korea, Hazel Smith evaluates the ‘marketization from below’ that followed the devastating famine of the early 1990s, estimated to be the cause of nearly one million fatalities. Smith shows how the end of the Cold War in … [Read More]
North Korea: Another Country
From the publisher’s website: America’s leading historian on Korea offers nuanced analysis that demolishes familiar generalizations “In the battle to open closed Western minds, this tart and witty broadside makes an excellent start.” —Financial Times Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an “insane” dictator at its helm, North Korea—charter member of Bush’s … [Read More]
The Korean War: A History
From the publisher’s website: A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, … [Read More]
War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War
From the publisher’s website: A comparison of the cultural and political/institutional dimensions of war’s impact on Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and the United States and the two Koreas, North and South, during the Korean War. It demonstrates the many underlying similarities between the two wars. Table of Contents Introduction / David R. McCann and … [Read More]
The Korean War: An Epic Conflict 1950-1953
From the publisher’s website: On 25 June 1950 the invasion of South Korea by the Communist North launched one of the bloodiest conflicts of the last century. The seemingly limitless power of the Chinese-backed North was thrown against the ferocious firepower of the UN-backed South in a war that can be seen today as the … [Read More]
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia
From the publisher’s website: Based on both archival research as well as extensive interviews with North Koreans inside and outside their country, in their native language (a surprisingly rare case in North Korean studies) Challenges some widespread assumptions about North Korea like the idea that ‘sooner or later, North Korea will emulate China’ (the author … [Read More]
Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-Hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea
By examining the most controversial Park Chung-hee period (1961-1979), Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-hee Era helps the reader rediscover the socioeconomic origins of modern Korea. The essays in this book written by twelve noted Korean social scientists discuss the relationship between South Korea’s economic development and totalitarianism in the form of the Park dictatorship. … [Read More]
Our Korean Kitchen
From the publisher’s website: OUR KOREAN KITCHEN is a celebration of the food, culture and flavours of Korea, a cuisine that is fast becoming the biggest trend in the culinary world. Capturing this movement, it introduces us to Korean food through a collection of classic and well-loved dishes. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book will explore … [Read More]