From the publisher’s website: The revised second edition of Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook is an accessible reference grammar and workbook in one volume. The text can be used in conjunction with any primary textbook, both as a practice book to reinforce learning and as a reference guide to the basics of Korean grammar. This book is … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 97)
Korean: An Essential Grammar
From the publisher’s website: Korean: An Essential Grammar is a concise and convenient guide to the basic grammatical structure of standard Korean. Presenting a fresh and accessible description of the language, this engaging Grammar uses clear, jargon-free explanations and sets out the complexities of Korean in short, readable sections. Key features include: clear explanations of grammatical terms frequent use of … [Read More]
Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar
From the publisher’s website: Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar is a reference to Korean grammar, and presents a thorough overview of the language, concentrating on the real patterns of use in modern Korean. The book moves from the alphabet and pronunciation through morphology and word classes to a detailed analysis of sentence structures and semantic features such … [Read More]
K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance
From the publisher’s website: 1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. These seismic shifts had a profound impact on the media industry and the rise of K-pop. In K-pop Live, … [Read More]
The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future
From the publisher’s website: How did North Korea become The Impossible State, where citizens found humming South Korean pop songs risk being sent to a gulag, and yet a starving populace clings fiercely to its Dear Leader Kim Jong-un? What does the future hold for a regime with terrifying nuclear ambitions and an endless war … [Read More]
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
From the publisher’s website: For years, North Korea watchers who speak no Korean have been confidently telling the world what motivates Kim Jong-Il. But in The Cleanest Race, B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. In a lavishly illustrated work that … [Read More]
Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea
Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea deals with issues of tradition, modernity, and identity in modern and contemporary Korean art. On a deeper level, this is one of the only books of its kind in English that exposes readers to specific artists and their works, an especially useful resource for those who wish to know more … [Read More]
Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945
From the publisher’s website: In Imperial Romance, Su Yun Kim argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and intellectuals than previously understood. Kim investigates representations of Korean-Japanese intimate and familial relationships—including romance, marriage, and … [Read More]
An Encyclopedia of Korean Buddhism
Extract from the authors’ Preface: When it comes to the composition of this encyclopedia, nearly all parts relevant to Buddhism are contained: history, tradition, temples, architecture, paintings, sculptures, crafts, music, dance, tea, rituals, practice, Buddhist cultural terms, and so forth. It is not easy for about 560 items to accommodate the various kinds of Korean … [Read More]
Solitary Sage: The Profound Life, Wisdom and Legacy of Korea’s “Go-un” Choi Chi-won
From the back cover: The ‘Lonely Cloud Scholar’ Go-un Choi Chi-won (857 – ?) is one of Korea’s most interesting and iconic historical figures. He can be considered a sort of hero of traditional Korean culture, particularly its Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Following a remarkably successful career as a brilliant Confucian government official in Tang … [Read More]
Spirit of the Mountains
From the back cover: San-shin (Mountain-spirit, Mountain-god or Spirit of the Mountains) is not yet very well-known in the world, despite being the most central and characteristic figure in traditional Korean culture. It remains uniquely Korean, although depicted with imported Chinese artistic motifs, which are clearly explained in this volume. Its various cultural roles and manifestations … [Read More]
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only … [Read More]
Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn Korea
From the publisher’s website: Investigating the late sixteenth through the nineteenth century, this work looks at the shifting boundaries between the Chosŏn state and the adherents of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and popular religions. Seeking to define the meaning and constitutive elements of the hegemonic group and a particular marginalized community in this Confucian state, the … [Read More]
King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea
From the publisher’s website: In King of Spies, prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden, reveals one of the most astonishing – and previously untold – spy stories of the twentieth century. Donald Nichols was ‘a one man war’, according to his US Air Force commanding general. He won the Distinguished Service … [Read More]
From Pusan to Panmunjom: Wartime Memories of the Republic of Korea’s First Four-star General
From Pusan to Panmunjom presents a wartime memoir of the soldier who, at the age of thirty-two, became South Korea’s first four-star general. This book provides a perspective to a cataclysmic war. [Read More]
Priest
In the frontier of the American West, a veil of evil threatens to engulf humanity. Servants of the fallen angel Temozarela are paving the way for their dark lord’s resurrection. One man stands in the way of the Apocalypse — Ivan Isaacs — a fallen priest who sold his soul to the devil Belial for … [Read More]