This book is not for readers intolerant of wordy, repetitive, and sometimes obscure prose or occasional minor factual errors. Yet those able to forgive such shortcomings will learn much from the original research and analysis provided by a promising young scholar.
Author Monica Kim takes the Korean War off the battlefields of military conflict and into the interrogation rooms in which prisoners-of-war (POWs) were grilled by their captors about their individual histories and beliefs. Making extensive use of postcolonial theory, Kim traces Korea's painful journey from independence, to a colony of Japan, to liberation from Japan under conditions that left the country divided and still imposed on from outside, to a brutal war that resolved little, and, finally, to the post-armistice dispensation of POWs. She devotes major attention to how the United States attempted to construct a liberal world order after World War II and how that attempt influenced the...