Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

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Bruce Cumings traces the growth of Korea from a string of competing walled city-states to its present dual nationhood. He examines the ways in which Korean culture has been influenced by Japan and China, and the ways in which it has subtly influenced its more powerful neighbors. Cumings also considers the recent changes in the South, where authoritarianism is giving way to democracy, and in the North, which Cumings depicts as a "socialist corporatist" state more like a neo-Confucian kingdom than a Stalinist regime. Korea's Place in the Sun does much to help Western readers understand the complexities of Korea's past and present.


From 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. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Chalmers Johnson, author of MITI and the Japanese Miracle
Bruce Cumings is America's leading historian and political analyst of contemporary Korea. His new book [conveys] a sophisticated analysis of the Korean Civil War and of South Korea's economic ascent ... He also refocuses attention on Korea as one of the world's distinctive civilizations, not some amalgam of Chinese and Japanese cultures ... This is the single best book anyone today can read on Korea.


The Economist
A leading American authority on modern Korea . . . catches the excitement of a country that has been at the peaks and troughs of East Asian history in the twentieth century.


The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas D. Kristof
Bruce Cumings is a prickly and provocative historian who is denounced by his critics almost as sharply as he denounces them. The foremost revisionist trying to reshape our understanding of the Korean War, he built his reputation several years ago with a monumental two-volume history of the origins of the conflict ... In Korea's Place in the Sun, written for the general reader, Mr. Cumings ... [offers] an energetic revisionist account of the two Koreas in the years since the war ... His book is important precisely because he marshals considerable evidence to challenge conventional understanding ... Korea's Place in the Sun is passionate, cantankerous and fascinating.


From Kirkus Reviews
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) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Chalmers Johnson
This is the single best book anyone today can read on Korea.


Walter LaFeber
The best, most stimulating work on the subject.


Kirkus Reviews
An elegantly informative account of Korea's convulsive transformation . . . into a nation.


Book Description
In his "immensely illuminating and accessible history" (Kirkus Reviews), Bruce Cumings delivers a memorable narrative of Korea's fractured modern history. Beginning with an overview of the cultural and political traditions of this accomplished civilization, Cumings dwells on Korea's long twentieth century, a period of colonial exploitation by Japan, war, and national division. His chapters on the Korean War show clearly just how close the world came to a nuclear holocaust. He then explores the economic resurgence and political turmoil that keep Korea in the headlines. Finally, he traces the significance of the Korean migration to the United States.


About the Author
Bruce Cumings is director of the Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Origins of the Korean War, the standard work on the subject.


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The single best book anyone today can read on Korea. — Chalmers Johnson


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