Korea
A History
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking world, its recorded history of some two millennia remains unfamiliar to most. Korea: A History addresses general readers, providing an up-to-date, accessible overview of Korean history from antiquity to the present. Eugene Y. Park draws on original-language sources and the up-to-date synthesis of East Asian and Western-language scholarship to provide an insightful account. This book expands still-limited English-language discussions on pre-modern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of Korea's modernization while discussing daily life, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ history, and North Korean history not always included in Korea surveys. Overall, Park is able to break new ground on questions and debates that have been central to the field of Korean studies since its inception.
Customer Reviews
Accessible and well detailed, but repetitive
“Korea” is a well written account that satisfied my want for a time-spanning history of the region and culture. It was a very good primer on the most crucial aspects of history that make Korea what it is today, including good detail on the politics and demographics of ancient Korea, Confucianisms place in an evolving culture, and years of colonialism and political turmoil.
While I found this book to be accessible as someone new to the history and generally felt well-guided on timelines, I found content often repeated between chapters and headers. While some repetition may be necessary for how the timelines are laid out in the book, I found many examples where sentences were repeated word-for-word between sections, often in places where it felt unnecessary to reiterate.
I would still gladly recommend this book though to anyone interested in a wholistic overview of Korea’s history.