Eugenia Kim's Blog, page 4

Night Sessions, by David Cho

Loved these poems. My review: http://bookoblate.blogspot.com/search...

This Burns My Heart, by Samuel Park

This Burns My Heart captures you with a heroine who is both irresistible and flawed, and will engross with increasing twists in a triangle of love and sacrifice. The story explores how a fateful choice colors a decade of marriage, and challenges a young woman's ambition already constrained by traditional Korean culture. Sam Park paints all the flavors of post-war Korea in this vivid debut, and

Everything Asian, by Sung J. Woo

The name of the book is taken from the name of the store owned by the parents of the main character, Dae Joon (David). Father has been in America five years without his family setting up a business, and the book begins a month after the arrival of Mother, Dae Joon and his noona (older sister, In Sook--Sue). Struggling with language and assimilation, the reunion of the family, and the teenaged

Through Our Eyes: Peace Corps in Korea 1966-1981, by William Harwood

This photograph book, while not a comprehensive collection of the early Peace Corps years in South Korea, includes numerous contributors, most notably Ambassador Kathleen Stephens' (under President Obama) photographs from the late 1960s. Because it includes color images from the years of rebuilding when Peace Corps volunteers were both welcomed and regarded with superstition in the rural

My Korean Deli, by Ben Ryder Howe

A posh literary magazine editor marries into a Korean family who buys a deli, and worlds collide. This review from a Library Thing member captures this humorous and thoughtful memoir succinctly.

Light in the Far East: Archbishop Harold Henry's Forty-Two Years in Korea, by Edward Fischer

Catholic Archbishop Harold Henry founded the Columban Mission Socieety in Korea during the Japanese occupation until WWII, when he (like many Westerners) were deported from Korea. He served as a chaplain in Europe, and was decorated for bravery. He returned to Korea during the Korean War, and his legacy includes 46 churches, a seminary, 21 schools, four hospitals, six leper colonies and 400 small

There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

[From the book jacket.] Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-WWII Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of

Skirt Full of Black, Poems by Sun Yung Shin

Like the title of the debut collection of poems intimates, the book evokes a woman's perspective on the rich textures of language, tradition, culture, the manners of the diaspora, sensuality, myth, religion, birth, siblings and family, relational manners, identity, longing and belonging. It is a varied collection, stunning in the paradox of its economy of language against the meanings portrayed.

Yankee Hobo in the Orient, by John Patric

The egomaniacal libertarian John Patric self-published (and signed) a large number of additional printings of this book, originally pub'd by Doubleday in 1945. An adventurer and recluse, Patric traveled on pennies throughout Japan, China, and Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. This loquacious text reports statistics of the area and times, and tells anecdotal incidents during his travels, both

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

One of the few books on North Korea to break into the mainstream reading public, Demick followed 6 people for 15 years of daily living in the oppressive totalitarian culture, who eventually make the difficult choice to defect, despite knowing the repercussions those left behind will suffer. Part of what makes Demick's book stand apart from many others that attempt to expose life behind the