The New Koreans
The Business, History and People of South Korea
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
'As good a guide to a fascinating country in transformation as you will get.' Management Today
In the course of a couple of generations, South Koreans took themselves out of the paddy fields and into Silicon Valley, establishing themselves as a democracy alongside the advanced countries of the world. Yet for all their ambition and achievement, the new Koreans are a curiously self-deprecating people. Theirs is a land with a rich and complex past, certain aspects of which they would prefer to forget as they focus on the future.
Having lived and worked in South Korea for many years, Michael Breen considers what drives the nation today, and where it is heading. Through insightful anecdotes and observations, he provides a compelling portrait of Asia's most contradictory and polarized country. South Koreans are motivated by defiance, Breen argues: defiance of their antagonistic neighbour, North Korea, of their own history and of international opinion. Here is an overlooked nation with, great drive, determined to succeed on its own terms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Breen (Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader) illuminates the nature of the South Korean economic miracle that took this nation from postwar ruin to prosperity, Gangnam style, in less than 50 years. South Korea's transition to democratic capitalism was shockingly fast and thorough, which Breen attributes to a combination of deep-seated cultural and historical factors an underdog complex, the desire to "win," the myth of national purity before attempting to peer into the South Korean soul and thereby predict the future of politics on the Korean peninsula. Despite Breen's decades spent living in Korea, he has not lost the casual, wink-and-nod cultural chauvinism of a foreign correspondent sent to cover the Third World. "There is of course some history, but not much," he asserts flatly about modern South Korea, following this up with a series of anecdotes about when the country stopped signifying "third world" poverty in the eyes of Westerners who are the only readership with whom Breen is concerned. Breen's insights into South Korean culture and politics are undercut by his joking tone and uneven writing style. This bizarre mix of pop psychology and cultural determinist theories won't serve Korea specialists or general readers.
