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Summary
Summary
Over the past 150 years Korea have moved in a steep trajectory from an isolated, traditional country to a modern society with a robust global economy and increasingly democratic politics. The author of this study contends that the survival of the political division between north and south shows that this path has been far from smooth.
Author Notes
Bruce Cumings is a writer, educator, and expert on Asian history and international relations. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975.
Cumings taught history and politics at Northwestern University and served as director of Northwestern's Center for International and Comparative Studies. His studies of Korea resulted in several books, including Korea's Place in the Sun and a two-volume set, The Origins of the Korean War. Cumings served as a historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War. He recounted censorship problems the production faced from the Public Broadcasting System upon its release in the book War and Television. Cumings is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History at the University of Chicago.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cumings's riveting history of modern Korea challenges much received wisdom. Rejecting the verdict of Western historians who support Japan's "modernizing role" in Korea, he characterizes the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) as a callous colonization that fostered underdevelopment, crushed dissent and suppressed indigenous culture. Director of Northwestern University's Center for International and Comparative Studies, the author is highly critical of the U.S. military occupational government (1945-1948), which he blames for bolstering the status quo and laying the groundwork for one of Asia's worst police states. Popular resistance in South Korea, he emphasizes, ultimately transformed an authoritarian regime into a relatively democratic society, while the North, which he has visited extensively, remains a cloistered, family-run, xenophobic garrison state. Yet, drawing on recent scholarship, Cumings argues that North Korea was never a mere Soviet puppet but instead resembled more autonomous communist nations, such as Yugoslavia. His incisive concluding portrait of Korean Americans presents a hardworking, upwardly mobile yet insular, ambivalent group, "in the society but not of it." This spirited, vibrant chronicle is indispensable for understanding modern Korea and its dim prospects for reunification. Photos. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An elegantly informative account of Korea's convulsive transformation from a cohesive, if authoritarian, agrarian society into a nation uneasily divided between the North's seemingly backward Marxist police state and the South's modern industrial showcase whose governance still owes much to dynastic, neo- Confucian principles. While Cumings (War and Television, 1992, etc.) focuses on the East Asian country's recent past (i.e., from the mid-19th century to the present), he provides a wonderfully discursive appreciation of the small peninsular nation's development in earlier eras, when it was frequently caught up in the geopolitical struggles of aggressive neighbors like China and Japan. Stressing the traditionally shrewd approach to foreign policy of those who have ruled Korea, the author (director of Northwestern University's Center for International and Comparative Studies) assesses the country's forcible annexation by Japan in 1910, its subsequent liberation, and its postWW II partition. Also reviewed in detail is the war between North and South during the early 1950s, and the Republic of Korea's unlikely emergence as an economic power (thanks in large measure to a well-educated indigenous workforce). Cumings goes on to record the mountainous South's progress toward establishing democratic institutions, a process accelerated by the pragmatic impatience of influential chaebols (conglomerates) with the capriciously acquisitive tyrannies of military strongmen. Covered as well are prospects for German-style reunification (an outcome that could discomfit Japan), the North's ``cloistered regime'' and the putative perils posed by its nuclear capabilities, the aspirations of expatriate Koreans (deemed a model minority in the US), and the place a united nation might claim in the Global Village's pecking order. An immensely illuminating and accessible history of a strategic Pacific Basin outpost whose yesteryears are remarkable for sudden reversals of fortune and arresting discontinuities. (maps, color and b&w photos, not seen)
New York Review of Books Review
north Korea may be the most secretive and totalitarian country in the world, as well as the wackiest. As a result, it inspires some of the best fiction and nonfiction, so the upside of the risk of nuclear war is an excuse to dip into literature that offers glimpses of this other world - and some insights into how to deal with it. Thousands of North Koreans have fled their homeland since the famine of the late 1990s, and many are writing memoirs recounting their daily lives and extraordinary escapes. A leading example is in order to live: a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (Penguin, paper, $17) by Yeonmi Park, with Maryanne Vollers. Park is a young woman whose father was a cigarette smuggler and black market trader. As a girl, she believed in the regime (as did her mother), for life was steeped in propaganda and anti-Americanism. Even in her math class, "a typical problem would go like this: 'If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?' " What opened Park's eyes was in part a pirated copy of the film "Titanic." The government tries hard to ban any foreign television, internet or even music, and North Korean radios, which don't have dials, can receive only local stations. But the black market fills the gap, with handymen who will tweak your radio to get Chinese stations, and with illegal thumb drives full of South Korean soap operas. I'm among those who argue that we in the West should do more to support this kind of smuggling, because it's a way to sow dissatisfaction. Indeed, what moved Park was the love story in "Titanic": "I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom." In the end, Park's father was arrested for smuggling, and the family's life collapsed. Park and her sister went hungry and had to drop out of school, and she survived eating insects and wild plants. So at age 13, Park and her mother crossed illegally into China - and immediately into the hands of human traffickers who were as scary as the North Korean secret police. They raped her mother and eventually Park as well, and both struggled in the netherworld in which North Koreans are stuck in China - because the Chinese authorities regularly detain them and send them home to face prison camp. Park and her mother were lucky, finally managing to sneak into Mongolia and then on to South Korea. Another powerful memoir is the girl with seven NAMES: A North Korean Defector's Story (William Collins, paper, $15.99) by Hyeonseo Lee, with David John. She is from Hyesan, the same town as Park. It's an area on the Chinese border where smuggling is rampant, where people know a bit about the outside world and where disaffection, consequently, is greater than average. Still, Lee's home, like every home, had portraits of the country's first two leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, on the wall. (The grandson now in power, Kim Jong-un, hasn't yet made his portrait ubiquitous.) Lee begins her story recounting how her father dashed into the family home as it was burning to rescue not family valuables but rather the portraits of the first leaders. There's an entire genre of heroic propaganda stories in North Korea of people risking their lives to save such portraits. Like other kids, Lee grew up in an environment of formal reverence for the Kim dynasty. At supper she would say a kind of grace - to "Respected Lather Leader Kim Il-sung" - before picking up her chopsticks. "Everything we learned about Americans was negative," she writes. "In cartoons, they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a 'hell on earth' and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy. " 'If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!' one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. 'If you do, he'll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.' " Hmm. No wonder my attempts at interviewing North Korean kids have never been very fruitful. Lee escaped to China at age 17 and started a new life in Shanghai but remained in touch with her family. One day her mom called from North Korea. "I've got a few kilos of ice," or crystal meth, she said, and she asked for Lee's help in selling it in China. "In her world, the law was upside down," Lee says, explaining how corruption and cynicism had shredded the social fabric of North Korea. "People had to break the law to live." It's fair to wonder how accurate these books are, for there's some incentive when selling a memoir to embellish adventures. I don't know, and in the case of "In Order to Live," skeptics have noted inconsistencies in the stories and raised legitimate questions. So how did North Korea come to be the most bizarre country in the world? Lor the history, one can't do better than Bradley K. Martin's magisterial under the loving CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, $29.99). Martin recounts how a minor anti-Japanese guerrilla leader named Kim Il-sung came to be installed by the Russians as leader of the half of the Korean peninsula they controlled after World War II. Martin discovers that Kim's father was a Christian and a church organist, and Kim himself attended church for a time. That didn't last, and Kim later banned pretty much all religion - though he became something of a god himself, quite a trick for an atheist. But do North Koreans really believe in this "religion"? Judging from defectors I've interviewed and much of the literature on North Korea, many do - especially older people, farmers and those farther from the North Korean border. That's partly a tribute to the country's shameless propaganda, which B.R. Myers explores in his interesting book, THE CLEANEST RACE: How North Koreans See Themselves - And Why It Matters (Melville House, paper, $16). He notes that North Korea produced a poster showing a Christian missionary murdering a Korean child and calling for "revenge against the Yankee vampires" - at the same time that the United States was the country's single largest donor of humanitarian aid. Myers argues that North Koreans have focused on what he calls "racebased paranoid nationalism," including bizarre ideas about how Koreans are "the cleanest race" - hence the title - bullied and persecuted by outsiders. For a more sympathetic view of North Korea's emergence, check out various books by Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago historian, like KOREA'S PLACE IN THE SUN: A Modem History (W.W. Norton, paper, $19.95). Cumings argues that North Korea is to some degree a genuine expression of Korean nationalism. I think Cumings is nuts when he says, "it is Americans who bear the lion's share of the responsibility" for the division of the Korean peninsula. But his work is worth reading - unless you have high blood pressure, in which case consult a physician first. Whatever the uncertainties about the accuracy of recent North Korean memoirs, it's absolutely clear that some stories about North Korea are fabricated - because they're fiction. Today's political crisis with Pyongyang is a great excuse to read Adam Johnson's the orphan MASTER'S SON, Random House, paper, $17), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013. Johnson tells the story of a military man turned prisoner turned celebrity turned villain, dealing for a while with utterly confused American visitors - an account so implausible and bizarre that it's a perfect narrative for North Korea. The other fiction that I'd recommend is the Inspector ? series by James Church, the pseudonym of a wellrespected Western intelligence expert on North Korea. Inspector ? is a North Korean police officer who investigates murders, a bank robbery and various other offenses, periodically dealing with foreigners and turning down chances to defect. Inspector O is a complex, nuanced figure who understands that the regime he serves is corrupt, brutal and mendacious, but he remains loyal. That's because he is a deeply patriotic and nationalistic Korean, and he resents the patronizing scorn of bullying Westerners. I think many North Korean officials today are an echo of the conflicted nationalist Inspector O. Nicholas Kristóf is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Choice Review
Here is modern Korea presented in ten chapters, beginning essentially in 1860 and continuing virtually to the present. Of the book's 500 pages, 300 deal with the post-1945 period, including separate chapters on "America's Koreans," and North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea of Kim IL Sung. Cumings (Northwestern Univ.), well known for his Origins of the Korean War (2v., CH, Jun'91), does not hesitate to interject his own opinions into the narrative and frequently enlivens the flow by contemporary allusions, giving a pungently idiosyncratic character to the work. Nonetheless, this is a book for someone already interested in the subject and with some knowledge of it. The richness of detail, especially in the earlier chapters, is likely to discourage many readers. This is a pity because, as Cumings constantly points out, Americans are dangerously ignorant of Korea. Furthermore, the distinctive contributions of Korean civilization to humankind merit much greater appreciation by outsiders than they have thus far received. Scholars of East Asian studies will welcome this book; interpretative literature about Korea remains both scanty and uneven in quality, and Cumings's interpretations should provoke useful argument. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. C. Perry; Tufts University
Library Journal Review
This culturally infused history begins with the decline of "Old Korea" and the opening of trade in 1860. The author (Ctr. for International and Comparative Studies, Northwestern Univ.; Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols., Princeton Univ., 1981 and 1990) shows that even as social systems changed, persistent Korean traits forged historic events. Cumings discusses Japanese colonialism and its founding role in modern Korean industry; the tragic, arbitrary division at the 38th Parallel; the Korean War; communism and its peculiarly East Asian characteristics; the United States's 1950 consideration whether to use nuclear weapons in Korea; widespread postwar poverty; political machinations in two Koreas, each emulating different models of ancient ideals; North Korea as a nuclear threat; potential reunification; and remarkable industrial growth. Most collections have sparse selections of books on Asia by true Asian experts, highly recommending this for all libraries.Margaret W. Norton, Morton West H.S., Berwyn, Ill. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.