Korea

Simon Winchester, New York Times best-selling author of Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman, takes an incredible journey through Korea: a walk from its southern tip to Seoul and the North Korean border, retracing the path described in the first Western account of this intriguing country. Winchester examines the persistence of tradition amid the industrial explosion and examines the orderliness of a society that categorizes and numbers its national treasures while students and workers demand democratic elections, freedom of the press and the release of political prisoners. Fascinating in its vivid presentation of historical and geographic detail, Korea is that rare book that actually defines a land and its people. Simon Winchester was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting foreign correspondent and writer. He lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland. “A treasury of informed insights into the culture, people, language, history, and politics of a county that has thrown off the legacy of war.” — Melbourne Herald Sun