Poignant, well-crafted, and emotional, this is an epic military story and one mans personal journey who will gain your respect and heart. At the same time, it is an outstanding short history of the Korean War.

"25 Albertype plates from photographs of Korea by Percival Lowell. Forbes Albertype Co., Boston, did the plates. This copy also contains two handwritten notes by Lowell laid in. One is of autobiograhical interest as Lowell gives a short resume in his career to this date. The pictures by him, as reproduced by the Forbes company, are striking and the tonal range of the collotypes is particularly effective in this book." -- Hanson collection catalog, p. 88.

Over the last half-century, the Korean Peninsula has become a region that has stolen attention from all over the world. The world villagers have started to recognize Korea is not just a nation in the corner, but a ring of fire that could threaten their peace and safety directly or indirectly. So the concern about the conflict between the North and the South, from the Japanese rule to the Korean War to the Kim family era ━ Kim Il-sung, Kim Jung-il, and Kim Jong-un ━ to the abruptly bulged-out nuclear problem has grown bigger and bigger. So if anyone who wants to sympathize and look deeper into peace and danger beyond Asia to the globe needs to know about the heated Korean Peninsula first. And the readers of this book can learn the messages of Yin and Yang and Tragedy and Hope that are hard to find in other books.

I am more American than Korean in my mind, writes K. Connie Kang, "but am more Korean than American in my soul. As for my heart, it is split in half."

Korea, June 1950. The "Land of the Morning Calm," freed at last from three and a half decades of Japanese colonial oppression, enjoys the fruits of peace and independence. In the southern countryside a small village celebrates its patriarch's sixtieth birthday, marking, according to tradition, his passage into old age. In the ancient capital of Seoul an American military advisor pursues his secret, reluctant Korean lover. And just to the north, just above a strange, arbitrary line called the 38th Parallel, a great army, well trained and equipped with Russian-made tanks, prepares in stealth for what its Communist commanders hope will be a brief and glorious war of liberation. "Like a shrimp caught between whales:" so Koreans describe the horrific events that followed. For, seeing their own national interests threatened, the great powers-the United States, Soviet Union, and China-transformed Korea into their bloody and tragic battleground. On this fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War, Land of the Morning Storm, presents the epic story of women and men, great and ordinary, powerful and powerless, Korean and American, caught up in this frothing, brutal maelstrom.