A fascinating work, dating from the late 1200s. This book (Yusa), is not just a story but a collection of histories, anecdotes and memorabilia, covering the origins of Korea’s three monarchies: Silla, Paekche and Koguryo, offering an account of the latter nation that differs quite a bit from what you’ll read in Chinese history books. … [Read More]
Booklist: History (page 34)
A Korean Village: Between Farm and Sea
From the publisher’s website: “Just south of the thirty-seventh parallel in Korea a long, jagged peninsula extends westward far out towards China into the Yellow Sea. At its extreme northwestern tip lies Sŏkp’o, a fishing and farming village of slightly more than a hundred households. This book is an attempt to describe the way of … [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]
Never Ending Flower
From the dust jacket: Seven years ago, Susie Younger went to South Korea. She has lived there ever since and hopes to remain for the rest of her life. She paints most vivid pictures of this charming and little-known country and of its gay, patient, hard working and desperately poor people, whose life she shares. … [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]
Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
From the publisher’s website: In this autobiography, Richard E. Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation during WWII, 1932 to 1945. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese … [Read More]
Living Reed
Synopsis from Goodreads and Amazon: The Living Reed follows four generations of one family, the Kims, beginning with Il-han and his father, both advisors to the royal family in Korea. When Japan invades and the queen is killed, Il-han takes his family into hiding. In the ensuing years, he and his family take part in … [Read More]
The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations
From the publisher’s website: This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press’s distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship … [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]
Korea and her Neighbours: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country
From the back cover of the Pacific Basin Books edition (Kegan Paul, 1985): Isabella Bird’s account of her journeys in Korea in 1898 represents one of the very rare accounts of that country in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time Korea was virtually a forbidden land and had only been open … [Read More]