An absorbing analysis of the social discontentment that plagues South Korea’s economic success.
South Korea is a wealthy and technologically advanced country, but its citizens are anxious, stressed, and headed toward demographic collapse, according to Gonzalez and Lee’s book-length study.
Gonzalez, an American educator who’s taught high school in South Korea, and Lee, a South Korean financial analyst and professor, have conducted a wide-ranging survey of the titular country’s manifest virtues and nagging problems. On the plus side, they note, is a culture that values hard work, competitiveness, self-sacrifice, and efficiency; society demands instant solutions to every problem and employs all manner of time-saving gadgetry, from restaurant call buttons that instantly summon waiters to self-service medical kiosks. The authors have found much unhappiness beneath the bustle, however. Several chapters discuss South Korea’s preoccupation with education: In the struggle to score well on the all-important exams that govern admission to elite universities, parents supplement their kids’ regular schooling with expensive “cram schools” and private tutoring, both of which strain family finances and leave students exhausted from the pressure. (An unexpected consequence, the authors note, is degree inflation: 69% of young Koreans have postsecondary degrees, which devalues educational credentials in the job market.) The authors also spotlight high rates of fatal accidents—capsized ferries, building collapses, deadly fires, workplace mishaps—stemming from lax safety regulations, corner-cutting, and corruption. They investigate what they see as a widespread soul-sickness that manifests in the corrosion of traditional norms and the younger generation’s sense of being stuck in a materialistic rat race (as in the Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts a South Korean game show in which players risk sudden death for money). The book also confronts a truly existential risk for the country in the form of extremely low fertility rates.
The authors construct their panorama of South Korea’s fortunes by combining illuminating statistics and graphs with an intimate, deeply observed account of cultural aspects, from the intense popularity of K-pop and plastic surgery to the warm tradition of sharing food with strangers. (Their vignette of a South Korean dinner paints a vibrant portrait of Confucian values in everyday life: “Everyone digs in with zest, enjoying every bite while being careful not to appear too eager or selfish or eat faster or larger quantities than the rest of the group.”) The lucid, workmanlike prose adds psychological resonance to the sociology (“Young Koreans are devastated by and frustrated with the economy’s inability to create sufficient, well-paying permanent jobs to accommodate the number of university graduates”), and it’s supplemented by revealing interviews: “Employment is… It’s like a big wall and trauma for me,” observes one young job seeker. “As soon as I graduated, I felt like an unnecessary [piece of] garbage in society, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even get an interview.” Readers interested in South Korea’s paradoxical tensions will find a wealth of insights, but the authors offer a larger lesson about the trajectory of modernity that could apply to many other countries that, having dedicated themselves to economic growth and material abundance, find themselves mired in a frustrating spiritual malaise.
An absorbing analysis of the social discontentment that plagues South Korea’s economic success.Pub Date: March 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781737651321
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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