| |
South Korea
Book Air Tickets
Book Hotel
Book Rental Car
History
Language
Maps
Posters
Recipes
Towns and Cities
Travel Guides
Weather
Links
|
|
|
Korean History
Here are some books about the history of
the Republic of Korea:
By Bruce Cumings
W. W. Norton
Paperback (528 pages)
 | List Price: $16.95
Lowest New Price: $10.68
Lowest Used Price: $8.43
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com:
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. |
|
By Don Oberdorfer
Basic Books
Paperback (496 pages)
 | List Price: $22.00
Lowest New Price: $12.29
Lowest Used Price: $6.04
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
Don Oberdorfer has written a gripping narrative history of Korea's travails and triumphs over the past three decades. The Two Koreas places the tensions between North and South within a historical context, with a special emphasis on the involvement of outside powers. |
|
By Michael Breen
St. Martin's Griffin
Paperback (304 pages)
 | List Price: $16.95
Lowest New Price: $4.99
Lowest Used Price: $7.25
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
The rise of South Korea is one of the most unexpected and inspirational developments of the latter part of our century. A few decades ago, the Koreans were an impoverished, agricultural people. In one generation they came out of the fields and into Silicon Valley. In 1997, this powerhouse of a nation reeled and almost collapsed as a result of a weak financial system and heavily indebted conglomerates. The world is now watching to see whether the Koreans will be able to reform and continue their stunning growth.
Although Korea has only recently found itself a part of the global stage, it is a country with a rich and complex past. Early history shows that Koreans had a huge influence on ancient Japan, and their historic achievements include being the first culture to use metal movable type for printing books. However, much of their history is less positive; it is marred with political violence, poverty, and war-aspects that would sooner be forgotten by the Koreans, who are trying to focus on their promising future.
The fact that Korean history has eluded much of the world is unfortunate, but as Korea becomes more of a global player, understanding and appreciation for this unique nation has become indispensable.
In The Koreans, Michael Breen provides an in-depth portrait of the country and its people. an early overview of the nature and values of the Korean people provides the background for a more detailed examination of the complex history of the country, in particular its division into the Communist north and pro-Western south.
In this absorbing and enlightening account of the Koreans, Michael Breen provides compelling insight into the history and character of this fascinating nation.
|
|
By Tae-Joon Lee
North-South Books
Hardcover (32 pages; 1)
 | List Price: $16.95
Lowest New Price: $9.95
Lowest Used Price: $8.29
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
Told in a few lines of text, this tender story was first published in a newspaper in 1938. This tale from Korea is universal--a small child waits for Mama at the station, asking the conductor if he has seen her. The conductor hasn't, but cautions the child to wait a little farther from the tracks. It is cold and snowy but the child waits patiently until finally Mama comes. In the last wordless spread, we see the small hand in a mother's firm clasp as they walk away from us. The art and text are so authentic, so real, that this book is best published in a bilingual edition that respects and honors those traditions. The Korean setting gives it special appeal to a growing demographic segment. The institutional market is especially hungry for bilingual books in languages beyond Spanish. |
|
By Michael E. Robinson
University of Hawaii Press
Paperback (220 pages)
 | List Price: $19.00
Lowest New Price: $15.97
Lowest Used Price: $21.86
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Book Description:
For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910.Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included--and thus implicated--Koreans within the colonial system. He gives readers access as well to an understanding of the unique aspects of Japanese colonialism in Korea--in particular how the relatively intensive economic development of the colony in the mid-1930s laid the foundation for subsequent development of human resources as well as the economy of the postwar period. Robinson concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula. He thus carefully analyzes the sources of authoritarianism in South Korea while detailing its relationship to stunning economic growth after 1960 and to the democracy movement through the 1970s and 1980s. He closes with a description of South Korean politics, noting that although procedural democracy triumphed after 1987, the development of a true pluralism representing all interest groups remains a work in progress. Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey succinctly and deftly captures the key contours of the country's past. Its balanced analytical narrative of the historical forces that shaped the political, economic, and social dynamics of the two Koreas make it a first-rate introduction to modern Korea and an excellent companion to courses on modern Korean society, politics, and history. |
|
By Robert Oppenheim
University of Michigan Press
Paperback (296 pages)
 | List Price: $22.95
Lowest New Price: $22.95
Lowest Used Price: $23.96
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
Kyongju is South Korea's preeminent "culture city," an urban site rich with archaeological wonders that residents compare to those of Nara, Xian, and Rome. By examining these ancient objects in relation to the controversies that engulfed South Korea's high-speed railway line when it was first proposed in the 1990s, Kyongju Things offers a grounded and theoretically sophisticated account of South Korean development and citizenship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its sensitivity to issues of place, knowledge, and cultural heritage and its innovative use of network theory will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in anthropology, Asian studies, the history of science and technology, cultural geography, urban planning, and political science. Robert Oppenheim is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. "A tale of South Korea's new politics involving antiquarians, weekend hikers, activists, and entrepreneurs, told with wit and theoretical sophistication."
---Laurel Kendall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History "In Kyongju Things, Robert Oppenheim employs an innovative theoretical blend to insightfully illuminate the interactions of agency and objects in the making of a 'place.'"
---Roger L. Janelli, Professor Emeritus, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University "Kyongju Things is responsible, pathbreaking, and ambitious, with a stunning and welcoming introduction . . . Oppenheim calls upon a theoretical tool kit that allows him to productively re-think place, locality, technology, things, and subjectivity in ways that really do challenge the existing scholarship on South Korea. Kyongju Things will make a splash in Korean studies."
---Nancy Abelmann, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement |
|
By Sook Nyul Choi
Houghton Mifflin
Paperback (144 pages; 1)
 | List Price: $6.95
Lowest New Price: $0.01
Lowest Used Price: $0.01
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
* "Wonderfully telling scenes evoke the time, the place, and—more subtly—the deep-running emotions that these people, bound by customs and besieged by troubles, were so rarely free to acknowledge."—Kirkus Reviews, pointer review
"Ms. Choi writes of social, political and personal hurts in a context few young
Americans today have experienced. Yet she tells of more than dislocation: she tells of Sookan's personal growth, indeed her triumph."—New York Times
Sookan, the unforgettable heroine of Year of Impossible Goodbyes, is now fifteen years old and a refugee in Pusan, a city in a southern province of Korea. The Korean War is raging, and she once again has been separated from her father and brothers. Anxiously awaiting any news of them, Sookan imagines a time when she can return to a normal life in Seoul. In the meantime, though she often feels sad, alone, and scared, she finds solace in a forbidden friendship and from the mysterious "shouting poet" who offers her and her fellow refugees inspiration each morning. |
|
By Gi-Wook Shin
Stanford University Press
Released: 2006-03-23
Paperback (328 pages)
 | List Price: $25.95
Lowest New Price: $20.56
Lowest Used Price: $17.75
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization.
|
|
By Otto F. Apel
University Press of Kentucky
Hardcover (248 pages)
 | List Price: $27.50
Lowest New Price: $22.00
Lowest Used Price: $14.50
Usually ships in 24 hours
(As of 05:35 Pacific 4 Jul 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Book Description:
When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly that he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland. In addition to his own story, Apel answers the questions anyone interested in a MASH unit would ask: What were the operating conditions like? What was a typical work load? What level of care did patients get? How did the doctors, nurses, and enlisted personnel get along? And, perhaps most obviously, how realistic was the TV series? Along the way, he tells the history of the MASH and the appalling lack of training received by the newly drafted doctors staffing those units. He also reveals many significant medical innovations in emergency medical care, from advances in arterial repair to the use of blood plasma in the treatment of hemorrhagic shock. |
|
 |
|
|
|
|