Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism 1866–1945

Compression of time invested in professional training, the rise of accounting cultures across multiple national academic systems, and perhaps the innate desire of authors to be published quickly, regardless of quality, have combined to birth a social sciences and humanities landscape teeming with increasing numbers of books and articles undermined by malformed prose, superficial empirical research, and votarist incantations of names in lieu of theoretical engagement. Publications in English on Korea’s colonial period ostensibly aimed at specialists have not been exempt from this trend. Too many titles have been more enthusiastic regurgitations and emphatic repetitions of the entirely familiar, less extended tangos with difficult sources and elusive concepts. Carter J. Eckert’s Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea stands outside such specious spaces and tremulous times, landing at a weighty and dense 512 pages, infused with limpid prose, based on consistently robust and occasionally even sublime empirical research, and propelled by...