A New History of Korea

by Ki-Baik Lee

Book Overview

The first English-language history of Korea to appear in more than a decade, this translation offers Western readers a distillation of the latest and best scholarship on Korean history and culture... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674615751
• ISBN13: 9780674615755
• Release Date: February 1985
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 474 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Important omission

In the original Korean version of this book, there is a very significant final chapter on elitism in Korean society. This chapter is omitted from the translated versions. That aside, the book offers a wealth of detail and provides what is probably the most comprehensive single-volume overview of Korean history in English. However, the historiography is limited to the listing and description of events. There is little analysis and the reader will, as I had to, read a number of additional and more specialised sources in order to understand why things happened as they did. Professor Yi's book is a good place to start learning about Korean history.

a very comprehensive overview

I read this book to get an understanding of the history of korea in the greater sense, and also as one of a group of books on Korean history. It is very comprehensive, coverinig gthe range of Korean history from a brief synopsis of the prehistory of Korea, through the major part of ancient Korean history to the bulk of more modern history. I enjoyed this book finding it to be an interesting read, with a lot of details, would make a good history text for a class on korean history, which is exactly what I wanted from this book.

Excellent introduction

This book provides an excellent overview of Korean history. It is neither too skimpy nor too detailed. It also contains a number of useful photographs (black and white) and illustrations (black and white), which helped me read this book through. While many books (either written in English or translated into English) on Korean history deal almost exclusively with Korean War, only a few books are available that describe the history of Korea from its prehistoric beginnings to the modern colonial occupation of Korea by Japan. Although Korea is the most important neighboring country of Japan, the history textbooks used in Japanese schools spare very little space for this topic. I recommend this book to anyone, who is interested in learning Korean history, as a first book to read.