Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (Updated Edition)
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Passionate, cantankerous, and fascinating. Rather like Korea itself."--Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Book Review
Korea has endured a "fractured, shattered twentieth century," and this updated edition brings Bruce Cumings's leading history of the modern era into the present. The small country, overshadowed in the imperial era, crammed against great powers during the Cold War, and divided and decimated by the Korean War, has recently seen the first real hints of reunification. But positive movements forward are tempered by frustrating steps backward. In the late 1990s South Korea survived its most severe economic crisis since the Korean War, forcing a successful restructuring of its political economy. Suffering through floods, droughts, and a famine that cost the lives of millions of people, North Korea has been labeled part of an "axis of evil" by the George W. Bush administration and has renewed its nuclear threats. On both sides Korea seems poised to continue its fractured existence on into the new century, with potential ramifications for the rest of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
