Books: Walking Dead History
By 10 Media on April 8, 2013 | 8:00 am | 0 Comments
Words by John Mensing If you’ve been following the American television series The Walking Dead, you’ve been treated to an extended meditation on what happens when what’s modern about society disappears. In The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012, 499 pages), Jared Diamond goes about the meditation from the other
10 Magazine Book Club
By 10 Media on March 25, 2013 | 2:33 pm | 1 Comment
10 Magazine Book Club is an intimate gathering of bibliophiles of all nationalities that takes place in Seoul on the last Sunday of every month. Backed by 10 Magazine and organized by professor and human rights writer Barry Welsh, the Book Club has hosted regular meetings since August of 2011. The Club's RSVPs are often more than double its self-set capacity of 50 guests,
Books: Staying in the Pan
By 10 Media on March 6, 2013 | 8:00 am | 0 Comments
The horror of how modern food is produced is set against a terrifying and suspenseful—at times gothic—narrative in The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (2006, 450 pages), a sustained piece of investigative journalism which reflects on the entirety of American food culture, with implications for all modern food cultures. The horror, the horror. Pollan reports
Books: Rowling, Wolfe, and That Book You’ve Been Meaning to Write
By 10 Media on February 5, 2013 | 8:00 am | 1 Comment
Words by John Mensing If you believe that the drama of life in a small town differs little from the drama between good and evil in a fantasy setting, then you’ll admire the recent novels of Tom Wolfe and J.K. Rowling, both of which showcase the battle between good and evil in a parochial framework. Rowling sets The Casual Vacancy (2012, 525 pages) in Pagford, a
Books: In a Nutshell
By 10 Media on January 5, 2013 | 8:00 am | 1 Comment
Our ability to understand Japan increased exponentially after the publication of The Enigma of Japanese Power by Karel van Wolferen in 1989; ditto with China and the works of Owen Lattimore decades earlier. The Chinese, of course, have their own understanding of Korea; the Japanese their own way of seeing Korea; Koreans understand Japan, etc., etc. But the understandings
Books: Asian Equality
By 10 Media on December 6, 2012 | 8:00 am | 1 Comment
In the post-modern ethos of globalization, looking back on the rise of modernity has lead to heated intellectual debates. From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia by Pankaj Mishra (2012, 356 pages) weighs into those debates with a revisionist approach, inventing a uniquely Asian strain to that ethos out of the biographies of some of
Books: Korean Art Packages
By 10 Media on November 9, 2012 | 8:39 am | 1 Comment
Hollym, a Korea-based publisher of English-language books, has released three more volumes in its Contemporary Korean Art series, attractively bound for display. (5) Dancing Korea: New Waves of Choreographers and Dance Companies (136 pp) by Kim Malborg is a compendium of the curricula vitas of 17 Korean choreographers and publicity descriptions of ten Korean
Books: Gulag Peninsula
By 10 Media on October 15, 2012 | 11:14 am | 1 Comment
Blaine Harden’s breezy reportorial style poorly suits a book, but he stretches it to fit Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West (2012, 205 pages), a primer on North Korea and a refreshingly quick read. The protagonist, Shin Dong-hyuk, has the distinction of being the only escapee from a North Korean prison camp to
Books: The Merits of Autocracy
By 10 Media on September 7, 2012 | 2:00 pm | 1 Comment
Words by John Mensing When the British East India Tea Company learned how China conducted a series of standardized tests to select its elite bureaucrats, they thought it was a great idea, instituted it for their employees, and it spread throughout Western Civilization until it manifested in the meritocratic cultural value detailed in Twilight of the Elites: America after
August 2012 Book Reviews: Korea Rising
By 10 Media on August 14, 2012 | 8:35 am | 1 Comment
Korea Rising Using the economic behavior of nations as the sole criteria for assessing intelligent life on this planet, Ruchir Sharma rank orders their brilliance in Breakout Nations: In Search of the Next Economic Miracle (2012, 304 pages). The author, head of emerging market investment banking at Morgan Stanley, peers over the hedge to give us the skinny on the
