I spent the day with my computer in the off position. I have been trying to get back to reading more, as I know it improves my affect some.
I read about 300 pages of David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a history of the Korean war that seems focused on the bizarre and erratic personality of Douglas MacArthur – as is appropriate I suppose.
It ended up being riveting and novelestic reading.
[daily log: um. . . no]
I read that book and was impressed by a lot of it along the way, but came to dislike it, even resent it.
The author (Halberstam) did, as you say, seem interested primarily in bashing MacArthur and the group around him, presumably as proxies for the Old America and right-wing Republicanism, or something. There is way too muc, uh, “editorializing” for what is supposed to be a history. I resented this. I didn’t buy the book to read somebody’s long-winded political essay about how bad such-and-such kind of people are, but to learn something about the war.
The fact that the Korean Nation (incl. its diaspora) was undergoing a kind of civil war in the 1930s-to-1950s period between two factions that can only loosely be called “Left” and “Right” (with, of course, significant foreign intervention all along the way) is interesting. It is also almost unmentioned in the book. Halberstam was uninterested. No time for all that; have to attack MacArthur. It seemed, to me, that he felt it didn’t matter if readers got any idea about what Koreans actually said and did and believed in those years; it only mattered that readers come away thinking MacArthur a buffoon and his vision of the world to be clownish and evil, or something.
A reader who buys everything being peddled in the book may well come away with the idea that MacArthur was the primary villain of the war, and that the war ended in a victory in that the primarily villain was defeated (i.e., fired by Truman).
The foreign scholar who I’d like to see write a Korean War book is B.R. Myers (sometime columnist for The Atlantic; frequently-cited NK expert; professor in Busan). I think he sees the Korean political world more clearly than anyone else does, and is also neither intimidated by a politically-correct consensus or angrily partisan one way or another. Halberstam, whatever virtues he may have, fails on the latter point.