Guy Delisle: Pyongyang – A Journey in North Korea Jonathan Cape, 2006 An account of a three-month work stint in Pyongyang at around the start of the Bush presidency, this book is neither particularly topical (it’s taken some time to be translated from the original French) nor well-titled. But it sure is original. We’ve read … [Read More]
Books and literature (page 45)
Sea-Jin Chang: Financial Crisis and Transformation of Korean Business Groups
The Rise and Fall of Chaebols (Cambridge, 2003) A welcome and very detailed examination of the history and structure of the Korean business conglomerates. The strengths of this book are manifold. First and foremost is the wealth of evidence sourced from the Korea Information Service which provides some raw data for some hard conclusions. And … [Read More]
Susie Younger: Never ending flower
Susie Younger: Never ending flower Collins Harvill, 1967 To describe this book as a memoir of a Catholic missionary in South Korea in the early 1960s, while factually correct, undersells it. Yes, the author is a person of deep Christian faith, but her work in Korea is more that of a social worker than evangelist. … [Read More]
Donald Kirk & Choe Sang-hun (eds): Korea Witness
Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm (EunHaengNaMu, Seoul, 2006) A tribute to the many foreign correspondents who have worked in Seoul, this book celebrates 50 years of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club. The book starts with one of the first mentions of Korea in the … [Read More]
Chae-jin Lee: A Troubled Peace
Chae-jin Lee: A Troubled Peace — US Policy and the Two Koreas Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2006 A very thorough review of the history of the relations between the US and (the two) Korea(s) over the past hundred or so years. To me, there’s rather too many trees and not enough wood, but I guess … [Read More]
North Korean animation
Radio 4’s weekly travel programme, Excess Baggage, had a slot on North Korea on Saturday morning (7 Oct). It was an interview with Guy Delisle, a French animator. Here’s the blurb on the programme from the BBC website North Korea is one of the most secretive countries in the world, with few visitors, especially westerners. … [Read More]
Fetishes, Phalluses and Mini-skirts – a review of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema
Kyung Hyun Kim: The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema Duke University Press, 2004 This book is for a restricted academic readership only. I can empathise with the feeling of inadequacy, crisis and male lack which, according to Kim, plagues the majority of protagonists in Korean film (though there is a difference between me and them, namely … [Read More]
More bookshops in central London
While in the centre of town for the session on Mingei at the British Museum yesterday I thought I’d check out some bookshops. It turned out to be an expensive trip. Firstly, Arthur Probsthain. A lovely pokey little bookshop for Oriental and African books just opposite the British Museum (41 Great Russell Street WC1B 3PE). … [Read More]
Korean books in London
We were unable to give a decent answer to the recent visitor to this site who asked where he could buy Korean books in London. The best anyone could come up with was to try a trip to New Malden. [Update: there’s a Korean bookshop in New Malden which I visited recently. More info here.] … [Read More]
Keith Howard (ed): Korean Pop Music – riding the wave
Keith Howard (ed): Korean Pop Music – riding the wave Global Oriental, 2006, 250 pp A very readable introduction to the history of Korean popular music. While the book is a collection of articles by different scholars, careful selection ensures that there’s no duplication and that the coverage is chronological. And for once in a … [Read More]
Requests for advice: hairdressers and bookshops
Two queries received recently from visitors to this site. Bookshops1. Does anyone know a bookshop in central London, New Malden, or anywhere in between, where they sell Korean books? That is, books written in Korean (novels, short stories, whatever) rather than books in English about Korea. Hairdressers. Does anyone know a good Korean hairdresser? Apparently … [Read More]
Kim Youngna: 20th Century Korean Art
(Lawrence King, 2005) A collection of articles, turned into a book. As I’m neither an art critic nor an art historian I’m going to restrict myself to a chapter-by-chapter summary of the ground covered. A useful overview of colonial period art. Highlights the difficulty of studying & researching the art history of the period, in … [Read More]
Korean books at the SOAS bookshop
Keith Howard of SOAS has just brough out a book on Korean popular music, 1920s to the present day. It covers the same period as Kim Chang-nam’s lecture of a few weeks ago, so obviously I’ve got to buy it. I tried to get my local bookshop to order it, but they said they couldn’t … [Read More]
Kim Jong-il’s book on cinema
Filmbrain has spotted – and bought and, even more nobly, read – a translation of Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. A snip at £22.50 from Amazon. I’ll add it to my wishlist, but I’m afraid it’s not top of the list! Thanks to atom over at koreanfilm.org for spotting this. Links: Buy at … [Read More]
Free books on the internet
I recently joined the Korea Studies mailing list at koreaweb.ws. Amid the emails on upcoming academic conferences and professorial vacancies there’s frequently an interesting nugget or two for an amateur like me. Recently there have been some communications about classic out-of-copyright books being available for free over the internet. In fact one academic, Thomas Duvernay, … [Read More]
Mark Clifford: Troubled Tiger
(M.E. Sharpe / Routledge 1998) Chronicles the modern history of Korea from the 1960s to the mid-90s, focusing on the drive for economic growth and the control exerted by the Blue House over the direction of the economy. Clifford gives us a politically balanced view, emphasising the successes of Park Chung-hee, but not shrinking from … [Read More]