Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea by Sheila Miyoshi Jager [Book Review]

This year marks the 60th anniversary of, if not the end of the Korean War, at least the Armistice. That’s two generations.

For almost anyone under the age of about thirty, the first-pass conventional view of the Korean War, if one thinks about it at all, is probably simple: North Korea’s invasion of South Korea was an act of unwarranted aggression, beaten back by the United States. South Korea, at least to my generation, has always been wealthy, educated and democratic, and North Korea has always been rogue, troubled and unstable. North Korea’s invasion of the South becomes, in this version, the antecedent to today’s troubled state.

This is an except from a review of Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea by Sheila Miyoshi Jager, originally published in the Asian Review of Books on August 19th, 2013. The full review can be accessed here.

This review was reprinted in Caixin on August 30th, 2013. The article can be accessed here.