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A review by lieslindi
The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings
Book Riot Read Harder 2015: A book that takes place in Asia
This was a difficult book for me, dense and scholarly and filled with unfamiliar names. But it was engaging: not a military history but one from all sides, political and economic and literary and aware of the rest of the world. Of *course* Truman got flak for "losing" China to communism, and of course this affected his decisions about Korea; I knew when the Chinese Communist Revolution ended but had never (?!) consciously associated 1948 with 1950. I had vague knowledge that Japan occupied Korea (I remember something somewhere about the former suppressing the latter's language) but never considered Koreans' fear of U.S. involvement in Japan bringing Japan back into Korea. I didn't even know that the U.S.A. occupied Korea from immediately after Japan's surrender into 1948. I began this book wanting to know what caused and started the war, and Cumings laid it out.
I'm considering sending this to my father, who served in Korea and elsewhere after the ceasefire.
This was a difficult book for me, dense and scholarly and filled with unfamiliar names. But it was engaging: not a military history but one from all sides, political and economic and literary and aware of the rest of the world. Of *course* Truman got flak for "losing" China to communism, and of course this affected his decisions about Korea; I knew when the Chinese Communist Revolution ended but had never (?!) consciously associated 1948 with 1950. I had vague knowledge that Japan occupied Korea (I remember something somewhere about the former suppressing the latter's language) but never considered Koreans' fear of U.S. involvement in Japan bringing Japan back into Korea. I didn't even know that the U.S.A. occupied Korea from immediately after Japan's surrender into 1948. I began this book wanting to know what caused and started the war, and Cumings laid it out.
I'm considering sending this to my father, who served in Korea and elsewhere after the ceasefire.