Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

This scholarly work is extremely well documented and annotated and, at the same time, relates current aspects of Korean life to its origins as far back as 2,000+ years ago.

I was a East Asian Studies concentrator at Harvard College. The author's seminal study, The Origins of the Korean War (Vol. I & II), is THE work for anyone interested in modern Korean history. His scholarship is impeccable and readers benefit from his eloquent and effective writing style. He is very passionate about the subject - I for one welcome it. In Bruce Cumings we do not have a scholar who tries to project objectivity with bland writing. However, because at times his passion covers his writing like a Hudson Bay blanket in a Mississippi summer, the author's work has been subject to criticism that his scholarship is faulty - nothing could be further from the truth. An examination of his footnotes and endnotes shows the work of a scholar. This book is a condensed version of his Origins of the Korean War (the early chapters and the later chapters of the book sandwich a summary of his masterpiece work). If you are going to read ONE history book on modern Korea, this should be the book.

Korea has a population nearly as big as Germany's, and the South is one of the world's largest economies - often (and misleadingly) cited as a model for other developing countries. The Korean peninsula has seen some of the most intensive and continuous American interference over the past 60 years of anywhere in the world. Today, American belligerence and North Korean obstinancy have pushed the region close to a disastrous conflict. Yet Americans know virtually nothing about this land or its people.Bruce Cumings's survey of Korean history confronts head-on this ignorance - and many of the preconceptions that go with it. On the one hand, he provides an engrossing and well-written narrative concentrating on the last 150 years of Korean history, informed and enlivened by his own experiences in both North and South. On the other, he sets out to challenge conventional wisdom on several key issues. Other reviewers have referred to Cumings's "leftist bias", but this is much too simple. What Cumings is doing is attacking the unexamined narratives and ideologies of his readers, both American and Korean.Thus he lays out a sympathetic explanation of the traditional Korean value system, which emphasized hierarchy and the proper relationships between superior and subordinate. He explains Japanese imperialism not as pure and ahistorical evil, but as a process of exploitation that was not only a national catastrophe, but also part of the globe-spanning disruption of existing economic and social relations that we call modernization.He shows that the Korean war was not an abstract battle between Communism and Freedom, but a very complicated civil war between diverse elements of the left (not only the government of the North, but also independent, grassroots elements seeking local democracy and a fairer distribution of land) and the right (composed mainly of a small section of Japanese collaborators and large landowners who were organized by the US to repress the popular socialist movements in the South). He exposes South Korea's "economic miracle" not as a triumph of democracy and free markets, but of authoritarian state planning. This proved to be both a major accomplishment for the nation and a terrible hardship for those who supplied the labor that made it possible.Perhaps most challenging for his American readers, Cumings describes the terrible devastation that the US turned on the Korean peninsula during the civil war. Gut-wrenching images of the indiscriminate bombing that leveled the North's urban areas and numerous other atrocities like blowing up dams are contrasted with the cool, rational justifications US officials made for engaging in massive terrorism against the civilians of both North and South.Cumings's method is to emphasize those realities that are suppressed or denied in mainstream accounts of Korean history. In the midst of the current crisis, where our media and leaders portray North Korea - isolated by the most powerful country in the world a

I loved this book and have read it twice from cover to cover in addition to refering to certain capters regularly. There is no other book that captures the colorful, tragic and compelling story of Korea's modern history half as well as Cuming's opus. The book is a skillful blend of theory (he quotes Focault in the epigram), hard history and ideology. I especially enjoyed the juicy bits of gossip that more "serious" Korean histories always leave out. He writes about Kim Gu's womenizing, Sygman Rhee's paranoia and the CIA's dirty secrets. The book has flaws that are glaring and annoying. Cumings details every attrocity that the dictators in South Korea committed, but writes only of the dubious "achievements" of North Korea, never mentioning things like how many of his own citizens Kim Il-son, North Korea's late "Dear Leader" sent to concentration camps. The harrowing accounts of North Korean defectors of life in the worker's paradise are a glaring and nearly unforgiveable. I would be tempted to say that Cumings had two goals in mind in writing this book: getting in good with Pyoungyang (thus being assured his travel visas always get approved) and annoying the hell out of Seoul (thereby regaining the cult hero status he got in the 80s with his book on the origins of the Korean War with a new generation of South Korean college kids). But, ultimately, I can't stay mad at Cumings. His story of Korea's painful 20th century is told with the verve and deftness of great literature.

I was warned against Prf. Cumings and his "unwholesome" views by some credible and respectable people. But when I asked them if they had actually read this work, I found out, as I had already suspected, that not one of them had! Naturally, I HAD TO satisfy my curiosity about this infamous author. AND I AM SO GLAD I DID. I know more for having read it. And reading it was so enjoyable.Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of this book is that it is so WELL WRITTEN. His prose is stylish and elegant. Do not expect of him the tedious and ponderous grandiosity adopted by the run-of-the-mill historians. His sentences are precise, energetic, and fluid.And what's more, I was charmed by his irrepressible wit. Indeed, it rendered reading through the all too many dreadful passages in Korea's history somewhat less unpleasant. Yes, he is definitely opinionated (and isn't that the whole point of a historian's writing about alleged facts anyway?) but very charmingly so. His refreshing candor and avowed passions for his beloved subject is disarming, and touching.As for the contents, they were shocking, to say the least. Take it from a Korean American who attended the draconian South Korean schools during the Park Chung-Hee regime; one becomes VERY skeptical when it comes to Korean "history". And I say as a skeptic that he has dug up some interesting facts, and I do believe that he did not manufacture them. Compared to the sloppily documented (if at all) slop they gave me in schools and the sleazy, bogus stuff circulating in Korean periodicals and papers, this version of history is far more plausible. And definitely possible - actually, make that probable - and certainly more compellingly presented.Also of interests are his sources. He cites many works I had never heard of before, for some reason or other. And there are many. Just for these alone this book should be highly recommended. *** Warning! You may get royally ticked off, especially if you are of Korean heritage or naive enough to trust that justice and wisdom prevail in this world.And I'd like to add, as a Korean American, that it is a wonderful change to actually read a book on Korea by a non Korean-born person who actually does "know all about Korea". I am particularly appreciative of the fact that he kept taking words right out of my mouth regarding the patronizing Western attitudes, especially from the likes of Beatrice Webb, who kept calling the Korean race "horrid", "low vertebrates," etc. When I emigrated to this country in '79, the only books I could find in my school library on Korea were written by people such as she. I was twelve and I shook with an impotent rage when I came across such ignorant remarks from such half-educated, narrow-minded, "Christians" abroad, out to "help" a benighted yellow race but only succeeding in blinding people back home about what was really out there - people just like them struggling to m