She Is Mine: A War Orphans' Incredible Journey of Survival by Stephanie Fast. 2015. Destiny Ministries. 224 pages. [Source: Review copy]
Stephanie Fast's She is Mine is a compelling, unforgettable memoir of a Korean war-orphan.
Her father, whom she never met, was an American soldier. He returned to the U.S. unaware that he was going to be a father. Her mother, ashamed and embarrassed, returned to her family. Initially beloved of her mother, the author was shunned by the rest of the family and shunned by the community in which she spent her early years. Eventually, her mother gave into the family pressure and abandoned her. The author was--at the age of four--put on a train and sent away. Told that "an uncle" would welcome her at the end of the line, the truth was she would never see her family again, never find her way back "home."
She had the clothes on her back, and, a day's worth of food. But how can a four-year-old survive on her own? But survive she did. The book chronicles the years--three or four years, I believe--she spent surviving, leading an uncertain, always desperate existence. Sometimes wandering in the country, in the fields; sometimes wandering into villages and cities. Usually her encounters with other people were negative. It went beyond her early-years experience of name-calling and "shunning." She was beaten. She was tortured. She was left to die. And yet. There were a few people who treated her kindly, with grace, who emphatically declared you must survive.
The memoir goes to really dark, really ugly places. I won't lie. Some of what she endured is horrifying and the fact that she was able to survive is a miracle.
She is Mine is ABOUT adoption, about the need for adoption, about how life-changing and amazing adoption can be. It's about adoption-as-redemption and redemption-as-adoption.
For anyone who enjoys nonfiction, this one is a must read.
© 2016 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
By Mary L. Dudziak
On 6 June 2014 at Normandy, President Barack Obama spoke movingly of the day that “blood soaked the water, bombs broke the sky,” and “entire companies’ worth of men fell in minutes.” The 70th anniversary of D-Day was a moment to remember the heroes and commemorate the fallen. The nation’s claim “written in the blood on these beaches” was to liberty, equality, freedom, and human dignity. Honoring both the veterans of D-Day and a new generation of soldiers, Obama emphasized: “people cannot live in freedom unless free people are prepared to die for it.”
Death is seen as the price of liberty in war. But war deaths are more than a trade-off or a price, shaping soldiers, communities, and the state itself. Drew Gilpin Faust wrote that during the Civil War the “work of death” was the nation’s “most fundamental and enduring undertaking.” Proximity to the dead, dying and injured transformed the United States, creating “a veritable ‘republic of suffering’ in the words [of] Frederick Law Olmsted.”
President Lincoln stood on American soil when he remembered the losses at Gettysburg. Does it matter that the site of carnage in World War II commemorated by President Obama was a transcontinental flight away? Americans were deeply affected by that war’s losses, even though the “work of death” would not so deeply permeate the national experience simply because the dying happened far away.
President Barack Obama marks the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion with veterans Clyde Combs and Ben Franklin as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Prince Charles on 6 June 2009. Official White House photo by Pete Souza via The White House Flickr.
Since World War II, war’s carnage has become more distant. The Korean War did not generate a republic of suffering in the United States. Instead, as Susan Brewer has shown, Americans had to be persuaded that Korea should matter to them. During the war in Vietnam, division and conflict were central to American culture and politics. A shared experience of death and dying was not.
If war and suffering played a role in constituting American identity during the Civil War, it has moved to the margins of American life in the 21st century. War losses are a defining experience for the families and communities of those deployed. Much effort is placed on minimizing even that direct experience with war deaths through the use of high-tech warfare, like drones piloted far from the battlefield.
Over time, the United States has exported its suffering, enabling the nation to kill with less risk of American casualties. Whatever the benefits of these developments, it is worth reflecting upon the opposite of Faust’s conception of Civil War culture: how American identity is constituted through isolation from the work of war death, through an export of suffering. With a protected “homeland” and exported violence, perhaps what was once a republic has become instead, in war, an empire of suffering.
Mary L. Dudziak is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory Law School. Her books include Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey and Cold War Civil Rights. Her most recent book is War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. She will be on the panel “Scholars as Teachers: Authors Discuss Using Their Books in the Classroom” at the SHAFR 2014 Annual Meeting on Saturday, 21 June 2014. Follow her on Twitter @marydudziak.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post This empire of suffering appeared first on OUPblog.
Tendrils of Life: A Story of Love, Loss, and Survival in the Turmoil of the Korean War. Owen Choi. 2012. Princeton Falcon Press. 408 pages. [Source: Review copy]
Tendrils of Life is historical fiction set in Korea. Most of the story, though not all of the story, occurs during the early years of the Korean War, 1950-1953. Flashbacks. Tendrils of Life has plenty of flashbacks. These take readers back even further, several decades further in some cases. These flashbacks do place the "main story" into context. I will say that there were times I was confused, but, by the end, I saw how the pieces of the puzzle fit together and I understood, for the most part, WHY the flashbacks were so important to the overall story. It is a complex story. I won't lie. For those unfamiliar with the Korean War--like me--this one may prove challenging: not impossible, just challenging. I believe it seeks to provide some answers, some insight, into the war itself: the history and politics. Trying to explain a war is not ever easy, and, I appreciate the complexity of this one.
The characters. I felt all the characters had strengths and weaknesses. I felt they were human which is the best compliment I can give any author. Tendrils of Life is at best bittersweet, if I'm being honest, more bitter than sweet. It felt bleak, very bleak, but its an honest bleakness and not mere manipulation.
Tendrils of Life was a bit outside my comfort zone, but, I am so glad I read it.
© 2014 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
True Colors. Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. 2012. Random House. 256 pages. [Source: Review copy]
I definitely enjoyed reading Natalie Kinsey-Warnock's historical novel, True Colors. This novel is set in Vermont, in the summer of 1952. The heroine of True Colors is Blue Spooner. (She absolutely HATES her name. Why did Hannah have to name her Blue? why?! Then again, why does Hannah have to name their new stray cat, "Cat"?!) Blue was a newborn baby left on Hannah's doorstep. There wasn't a note, explanation, or clues, at least not that have been revealed to our young heroine. Blue spends her time doing dozens of chores on the farm, fantasizing about finding her mother, and hanging out with her summer-time friend, Nadine. This summer has been extra difficult, perhaps, because Nadine is distant and sometimes haughty. She is a year or two older than our heroine, and Hannah assures her that Nadine is just "at that age" and that Blue will understand more when she's "that age." It's a summer of living and learning, Blue, for example, gets her first job and first paycheck. She also attends her first quilting meetings. She finds that she's good at listening and writing. (Sometimes she's a little too good at listening when she overhears a few things she shouldn't.) Family. Friendship. Community. It's a coming of age novel that touches on the bittersweet; I found it completely satisfying.
© 2014 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
By Joseph M. Siracusa
Any discussion of North Korea’s nuclear program should begin with an understanding of the limited information available regarding its development. North Korea has been very effective in denying external observers any significant information on its nuclear program. As a result, the outside world has had little direct evidence of the North Korean efforts and has mainly relied on indirect inferences, leaving substantial uncertainties.
Moreover, because its nuclear weapons program wasn’t self-contained, it has been especially difficult to determine how much external assistance arrived and from where, and to assess the program’s overall sophistication.
That said, what is known is that Pyongyang has tested three nuclear devices: in 2006, 2009, and, of course most recently, on 12 February 2013. They have all had varying degrees of success, and North Korea has put considerable effort into developing and testing missiles as possible delivery vehicles.
February’s detonation of a “smaller and light” nuclear device — presumably, part of the plan to build a small atomic weapon to mount on a long-range missile — was the first test carried out by Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. And while it always intriguing to speculate on who is running the show in North Korea, the finger generallyseems to point to the military.
Many foreign observers have come to believe the otherwise desperate, hungry population (and failing regime?) that make up North Korea’s secretive police state is best symbolized by its nuclear and missile programs. Which gives rise to the basic question: what, then, is Pyongyang’s motivation for its nuclear and missile programs? Is it, as Victor Cha once asked, for swords, shields, or badges?
In other words, are the programs intended to provide offensive weapons, defensive weapons, or symbols of status? In spite of prolonged diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang officials over the past two decades, the question of motivation remains elusive.
Pyongyang’s interest in obtaining nuclear weaponry, beginning around the mid-1950s, has apparently stemmed in part from what it perceived as the US’s nuclear threats and concerns about the nuclear umbrella that protects South Korea. These threats, in turn, have pervaded North Korean strategic thought and action since the Korean War.
These actions may be gauged as offensive or defensive, but Pyongyang officials were at one point fearful of South Korea’s nuclear ambitions and later uncertain about the US emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons and its nuclear “first use” policy in defense of the South. These nuclear-armed additions included 280mm artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and mines.
Against this backdrop, all of North Korea’s nuclear activities tend to focus on a single goal: preservation of the regime. Possessing nuclear weapons would diminish the US’s threat to the nation’s independence, but it could also reduce Pyongyang’s dependence upon China for its security.
North Korean officials, too, may feel that a small nuclear force offers some insurance against South Korea’s dynamic economic growth and its eventual conventional military superiority.
Pyongyang undoubtedly views its burgeoning nuclear arsenal as a symbol of the regime’s legitimacy and status, which would assist in keeping the Stalinist dynasty in power. Additionally enhanced status would, of course, assist in gaining diplomatic leverage.
Although the North Koreans have boasted about their nuclear deterrent’s ability to hold the US and it allies at bay, it is fairly clear that North Korea has vastly overstated its ability to strike, in part because of the limited amount of fissile material available to Pyongyang and also because of its inability to field a credible delivery option for its nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans have launched long-range ballistic missiles in 1998, 2006, 2009, and 2012, with limited success. By comparison, the US test fires its new missiles scores of times to ensure that they are operationally effective. North Korea would need many more tests of all the systems, independently and together, at a much higher rate than one every few years, to have confidence the missile would even leave the launch pad, let alone approach a target with sufficient accuracy to destroy it.
This was dramatically demonstrated on 13 April 2012, by the failure of the much-hyped effort to employ a three-stage missile, which would send a satellite into space. If the missile was, as Washington and Tokyo believed, a disguised test of an ICBM, the fact that it crashed into the sea shortly after launch illustrated that North Korea’s development and testing of missiles as possible delivery vehicles had miles to go.
Joseph M. Siracusa is Professor in Human Security and International Diplomacy and Associate Dean of International Studies, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Among his numerous books are included: Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction (2008) and A Global History of the Nuclear Arms Race: Weapons, Strategy, and Politics, 2 vols., with Richard Dean Burns (2013).
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS
Image credit: North Korea Theater Missile Threats, By Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS.) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post North Korea and the bomb appeared first on OUPblog.
