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]
Booklist: Modern History (page 23)
Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea
From the publisher’s website: James B. Palais theorizes in his important book on Korea that the remarkable longevity of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) was related to the difficulties the country experienced in adapting to the modern world. He suggests that the aristocratic and hierarchical social system, which was the source of stability of the dynasty, was … [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]
The Colonial Origins of Korean Enterprise, 1910–1945
From the publisher’s website: South Korean conglomerates, or ‘chaebol,’ such as Hyundai and Samsung, play a far more important role in the Korean economy than do comparable large firms in the US and Japanese economies. Despite the importance of the chaebol to the rapid postwar development of the Korean economy, little has been written about … [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]
Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920-1925
From the publisher’s website: By studying the early splits within Korean nationalism, Michael Robinson shows that the issues faced by Korean nationalists during the Japanese colonial period were complex and enduring. In doing so, Robinson, in this classic text, provides a new context with which to analyze the difficult issues of political identity and national … [Read More]
Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization
From the publisher’s website: Clark Sorensen presents a description of the economic and ecological organization of rural Korean domestic groups and an analysis of their adaption to the changes brought about by Korea’s rapid industrialization. Still one of the only book-length studies of rural, peasant Korean households, Over the Mountains Are Mountains shows how the industrialization of … [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]
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]