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)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04011-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
It took 14 years to build and it cost 15 million dollars and the lives of 20 workmen. Like the Atlantic cable and the Suez Canal it was a gigantic embodiment in steel and concrete of the Age of Enterprise. McCullough's outsized biography of the bridge attempts to capture in one majestic sweep the full glory of the achievement but the story sags mightily in the middle. True, the Roeblings, father and son who served successively as Chief Engineer, are cast in a heroic mold. True, too, the vital statistics of the bridge are formidable. But despite diligent efforts by the author the details of the construction work — from sinking the caissons, to underground blasting, stringing of cables and pouring of cement — will crush the determination of all but the most indomitable reader. To make matters worse, McCullough dutifully struggles through the administrative history of the Brooklyn Bridge Company which financed and contracted for the project with the help of the Tweed Machine and various Brooklyn bosses who profited handsomely amid continuous allegations of kickbacks and mismanagement of funds. He succeeds in evoking the venality and crass materialism of the epoch but once again the details — like the 3,515 miles of steel wire in each cable — are tiresome and ultimately entangling. Workmanlike and thorough though it is, McCullough's history of the bridge has more bulk than stature.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0743217373
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
