‘We lived on what you feed pigs, sorghum, and it was full of weevils. You had to cook it first and then take the weevils out, ’cause you couldn’t catch them when they were alive.’ On 25 April 1951 after the desperate three-day battle of the Imjin River, Hampshire man Bob Warrior was captured and … [Read More]
Category: 1945-1960 (page 7)
Book Review: Reginald Thompson — Cry Korea
As British war veterans gather in Korea to mark the anniversary of the battle of the Imjin River, Jennifer Barclay reviews a recently republished eye-witness account of the early months of the war. Cry Korea is the most unusual book I’ve read about the Korean War. While interviewing British veterans of that war, I’m often … [Read More]
Hwang Sun-won: Trees on a Slope
Hwang Sun-won: Trees on a Slope Originally published 1960. Translation by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, University of Hawaii Press, 2005 Hwang Sun-won’s Trees on a Slope is one of the few Korean novels directly dealing with the Korean War to be available in English. That’s not to say it’s anything like the bludgeoning experience of … [Read More]
Book review: The Dawn of Modern Korea
Andrei Lankov – The Dawn of Modern Korea EunHaeng NaMu publishing, 2008 This entertaining book has, paradoxically, taken me a devil of a long time to finish. That’s not because it’s difficult. It’s because it’s the opposite. The book is co-branded with a series of articles that Andrei Lankov has been writing for the Korea … [Read More]
Sex, modernity and the Korean war: a review of Ahn Junghyo’s Silver Stallion
Ahn Junghyo: Silver Stallion – a novel of Korea Soho Press, 1990 First published in Seoul in 1986 Translated from the Korean by the author As the book opens, we encounter a small village which is somehow untouched by the Korean war which seems to have passed them by. The old order, personified by Old … [Read More]
James Salter: The Hunters
Penguin 2007 (originally published 1956) A ripping yarn set among the US fighter pilots in the Korean war. Apart from the passing references to Korean houseboys, and the fact that the dogfights take place over the river Yalu, there’s nothing to distinguish this novel plot-wise from your average Commando war mag. There’s the experienced and … [Read More]
West, Philip and Suh, Ji-moon: Remembering the “forgotten war”
The Korean War through Literature and Art (M.E. Sharpe, 2001) An interesting and approachable collection of papers addressing how the Korean war is represented in the arts of the different countries involved. Chapters address Korean film, visual arts, and poetry, and also how the war impacted the lives and work of six Korean novelists. For … [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]
The passing of a Korean war veteran
From a recent obituary in the Telegraph: Vice-admiral Sir Charles Mills, who has died (on July 27) aged 91, was a talented staff officer whose one chance of independent command came in the destroyer Concord during the Korean War. In the course of six patrols over 95,000 miles with Dutch and New Zealand ships of … [Read More]
Alternative takes on Independence Day
The Chosun Ilbo provides some interesting alternative takes on Independence Day. It’s not just the day that Koizumi visited the Yasukuni shrine again, or when Koreans held anti-American demonstrations. First, the event was marked in Japan, as it has for the past 16 years, by a “Concert for Peace” given by the Tokyo Phil, this … [Read More]
War & Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War.
David McCann & Barry Strauss (eds) (ME Sharpe, 2001) Crazy title, seemingly of limited readership: ancient historians also interested in modern East Asian history (or vice versa). But it’s a fascinating collection of articles. “How like Alcibiades was General MacArthur?” asks one article… Read a grown-up review of this book over at the Korean Studies … [Read More]
Paul French: North Korea – the paranoid peninsula
(Zed, 2005) Highly readable and wide-ranging book on North Korea. Describes clearly some of the eccentricities of the regime, such as the Sinuiju economic zone, and describes clearly for the benefit of non-economists how it is that a rigid centrally-planned economy is doomed to fail. Links: Buy North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula at Amazon [Read More]
Richard Hooker: M*A*S*H
Fun, easy-to-read stories about the army surgical hospitals in the Korean War. Each of the chapters feels as if it’s tailor-made for an episode of a TV series (funny, that). As a Brit, I sometimes find I need a dictionary to translate some of the Americanisms (and I start skim-reading when they’re talking in any … [Read More]
Hwang Sok-yong: The Guest
(Seven Stories, 2005) Translated by Chun Kyung-ja and Maya West Originally published as 손님, Seoul 2001 The Guest of the title is an unwelcome foreigner: originally applied to smallpox, it is used by extension to cover the cultural imports of communism and Christianity. The theme of the book is that until the ghosts of the … [Read More]