Korea: A New History of South and North By Victor D. Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. xix + 268 pages. $30.00 (Cloth)

The authors present a very readable and deeply informed history of Korea-its shared heritage until late 1945, followed by diverging paths in the South and the North and conflicts that have obscured millennia of shared experiences, Korea's location-sandwiched between China, Russia, and Japan-plus its military, political, economic, and cultural capabilities make the entire peninsula a major factor in world affairs.The authors show a deep understanding of the problems that have confronted the leaders and peoples of South and North in the nearly eighty years since their division.While fully aware of the cruelties of Japan's occupation, the authors also note how the Japanese authorities built up Korea's educational institutions (pp.23-24)-for their own goals, of course.Korean became the second language after Japanese for the educated, but the number of schools grew from 2,000 in 1911 to over 5,000 in 1938, while the number of universities increased from 5 to 17.The authors three times mention the Korean 24-letter alphabet hangeul sponsored in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great to facilitate literacy by serving as an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja.Hangeul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class.This book might have devoted more space to efforts to spread literacy and learning.In the late nineteenth century, Christian missionary schools fostered hangeul.Still, by 1912 literacy in Korea was only 20 percent.It rose to over 60 percent by 1940.Many Koreans north and south have shown a passion for learning.What do the authors say about the US role in Korea's history?Cha recalls his chagrin when a White House official showed visiting Koreans Theodore Roosevelt's Nobel prize medal in 1905, perhaps ignorant of the contemporaneous Taft-Kasura agreement that handed Korea to Japan.The book notes the paternalism and perhaps racism in Franklin Roosevelt's belief that Koreans would not be able to govern themselves when Japan's occupation ended.For Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, Europe was the foreign policy priority, but when the North invaded south Korea, Truman took resolute action.