Product Description: Several decades after the Korean War, the unnamed narrator of this story is taken in by an aged Turk, Uncle Hassan, a veteran of that conflict who makes a living as a butcher in a Seoul slum. The precocious narrator, a troubled boy, wonders who his parents are and why they abandoned him...read more

Product Description: The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy...read more

Product Description: A Bill-Brysonesque romp through this often-overlooked travellers’ gem of East Asia. For seventeen years, journalist, teacher, and coach Mark Dake has called South Korea home. Now, with his longtime Korean friend Heju, he sets out on a four-month, ten-thousand-kilometre road trip, determined to uncover the real country...read more

Product Description: Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding...read more

Product Description: This is the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was playing a high-risk game of deception — and escape. As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to love his Great Leader...read more

Product Description: It’s Madness examines Korea’s years under Japanese colonialism, when mental health first became defined as a medical and social problem. As in most Asian countries, severe social ostracism, shame, and fear of jeopardizing marriage prospects compelled most Korean families to conceal the mentally ill behind closed doors...read more

Product Description: Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when Korea became entangled in the world of modern imperialism and the old social, economic and political order began to change; this handbook brings together cutting edge scholarship on major themes in Korean History...read more

Product Description: An Amazon Best of The Year Nonfiction SelectionLibrary Journal Top Ten Book of the Year!The Extraordinary True Story of Kim Jong-Il’s kidnapping of the golden couple of South Korean Cinema, The Movies They Were Forced to Make, and Their Daring Escape...read more

Product Description: Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this comprehensive book surveys Korean history from Neolithic times to the present. Michael J. Seth explores the origins and development of Korean society, politics, and still little-known cultural heritage from their inception to the two Korean states of today...read more

Product Description: Why have traditional views of national identity in South Korea―views that for years drove a demand for reunification―been challenged so dramatically in recent years? What explains the growing ambivalence and even antagonism of South Korean young people toward unification with North Korea? Emma Campbell addresses these related puzzles, exploring the emergence of a new kind of nationalism in South Korea and considering what this development means for the country’s future...read more

This major study discusses some of the meanings and preconditions of freedom, responsibility and social order. The author argues that these are problems of modernity. The imagination of civil society created a milieu which was at once the location and defence of social self-sufficiency in the world. The book identifies the origins of civil society in the work of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and the often forgotten philosophers of the Scottish Enlightnement. It shows how the assumptions of civil society, and the state of nature, fed into the sociological and philosophical discourses which emerged in the nineteenth century. The book does not ask ‘What is civil society?’; instead it asks ‘Why is civil society?’ The author concludes that through civil society, the protagonists and heirs of European modernity struggled to make their world meaningful and safe. Civil society involved the establishment of boundaries between the community of the social and the terrifying milieu of Nature.

Product Description: Trees don't have ears.How are you so sure?As they attempt to flee the Best Nation in the World, North Korean sisters Minhee and Junhee are torn apart at the border. Each must race across time and space to be together again – navigating the perilous Land of the Free and the treacherous terrain of personal belief...read more

Product Description: A finalist for the prestigious August Prize, All Monsters Must Die is the story of North Korea, past and present, offering a rare and fascinating window into the most isolated country in the world. In 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is founded by General Kim Il-sung...read more