Free Republic

... Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” [is] a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context. Mr. Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago and the author of “The Origins of the Korean War,” a respected two-volume survey. He mows down a host of myths about the war...

NORTH KOREA [Andrew Stuttaford] Fascinating review from The Atlantic on some new books about North Korea. Read the whole thing but puzzle for a second on the strange case of Bruce Cumings, a history professor from the University of Chicago, author of North Korea: Another Country, a book in which the reviewer, B.R. Myers, notes, somewhat acidly, “we are even informed that the regime's gulags aren't as bad as they're made out to be, because Kim Jong Il is thoughtful enough to lock up whole families at a time.” The motivation of men like Cumings remains a mystery to me....