Korea

"Like several of the best books on the Korean War, this one is out of print. When David Halberstam was doing his book on the Korean War a few years ago he wrote that he went to a public library and he found 88 books on the Vietnam War and four on the Korean War, and I think that says a lot about the general lack of scholarship and interest in the Korean War in the U.S. John Merrill’s book is one of the very best. It is based on a lot of archival research and it looks at the internal emergence of the Korean War in the late 1940s rather than this idea that it started only in June 1950, which is of course the official American position. He was the first American to write about a rebellion on Cheju Island off the southern coast where at least ten percent of the population was killed in a very brutal suppression campaign. It is a very fine book."