J. A. V. Simson

Korea, Are You at Peace?: Tales of Two Women Travelers in a Troubled Land J. A. V. Simson

Is there hope for peace on the Korean peninsula? These deeply personal stories of two Western women reveal the almost unimaginable transformation of Korea from a culturally and politically united peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century into today's dangerously divided land. These two women's experiences bracket the twentieth century, a dark time in Korean history, when the peninsula was occupied by Japan, divided into North and South, and wracked by internal war-becoming an unwilling pawn of Cold-War superpowers. Despite everything, South Korea has emerged as an international economic success story, whereas North Korea has become a totalitarian ideological nightmare in which leaders spew the rhetoric of aggression and develop nuclear weapons. What would it take to heal this political schizophrenia that endangers our entire world?