From the publisher’s website: American business folklore is awash with the adventures of successful entrepreneurs. Still, most of these stories are about Americans, neglecting important and courageous entrepreneurs from other countries. Made in Korea recounts the story of how Chung Ju Yung rose from poverty to build one of the world’s largest and most successful … [Read More]
Booklist: 1945-1960 (page 7)
The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea
From the publisher’s website: The United States and Biological Warfare argues persuasively that the United States experimented with and deployed biological weapons during the Korean War. Endicott and Hagerman explore the political and moral dimensions of this issue, asking what restraints were applied or forgotten in those years of ideological and political passion and military … [Read More]
A Korean Nationalist Entrepreneur: A Life History of Kim Songsu, 1891–1955
From the publisher’s website: During the period of Japanese domination, Kim Songsu emerged as one of Korea’s leading cultural nationalists. This life history details his contribution to the self-strengthening programs moderate nationalists advocated as the foundation for Korea’s independence. “Choong Soon Kim’s well-written book weaves a history of Korean capitalism and a history of an … [Read More]
The Descendants of Cain
Hwang Sun-won, perhaps the most beloved and respected Korean writer of the 20th century, based this extraordinary novel on his own experiences in his North Korean home village between the end of World War II and the eve of the Korean War when Korea had been divided into North and South by its two “liberators” … [Read More]
Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung
From the publisher’s website: This study focuses on a single Korean “chaebol”, the business conglomerate which dominates the Korean economy. Hyundai, the largest chaebol, is examined in the context of Korean history, ancient and modern, and the Confucian value system that permeates all Korean life. [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]
Human Rights in Korea: Historical and Policy Perspectives
From the publisher’s website: These chapters by eight Korea specialists present a new approach to human rights issues in Korea. Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea’s modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of … [Read More]
A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks
After more than two years of bitter negotiations during which combatants & civilians continued to suffer casualties, the Korean armistice was concluded in July 1953. Focusing on the Americans formulation of negotiating positions & on their attempts to coordinate political goals with military tactics, Rosemary Foot here charts the tortuous path to peace & offers … [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 Korean Workers’ Party: A Short History
The Korean Workers’ Party is the first in a new Hoover Institution Press series on the histories of the sixteen ruling communist parties from their inception to the present time. Dr. Chong-Sik Lee, a distinguished Asian scholar, accepted an invitation by the Hoover Institution to write a short history of the Korean Communist movement as … [Read More]
The Korean Pentecost: And the Sufferings Which Followed
In 1977 the Trust published this remarkable account of the first 60 years or so of the modern church in Korea (mainly North Korea). William Blair (1876–1970), in his first term of missionary service, was at the centre of the great revival of 1907, and his account of this and the events leading up to … [Read More]
MASH
Before the movie, this is the novel that gave life to Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Hot Lips Houlihan, Frank Burns, Radar O’Reilly, and the rest of the gang that made the 4077th MASH like no other place in Korea or on earth. The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the … [Read More]
The Martyred
Publisher description: During the early weeks of the Korean War, Captain Lee, a young South Korean officer, is ordered to investigate the kidnapping and mass murder of North Korean ministers by Communist forces. For propaganda purposes, the priests are declared martyrs, but as he delves into the crime, Lee finds himself asking: What if they … [Read More]
Cry Korea: The Korean War: A Reporter’s Notebook
From the back cover: “Now in the twentieth century as it moves towards sanity or mad despair the slayer needs merely touch a button and death is on the wing, blindly, blotting out the remote, the unknown people.” From September 1950 Reginald Thompson reported from the frontline during the four months in which the Korean … [Read More]