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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
