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The Bridge at No Gun Ri book review...
All:
I got this from Amazon.com about the book, what reveiw are you discussing on
this thread???
"The AP investigation of a 1950 shooting of South Korean civilians by U.S.
soldiers won Hanley, Choe and Mendoza the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and ignited
a series of controversies that as yet remain unresolved. In the early days
of the Korean War, as defeat began sliding into disaster, inexperienced,
poorly commanded U.S. troops received higher orders to stop, by force if
necessary, civilian movement through their lines. They responded, the
journalists found, by massacring a number of South Korean civilians near the
village of No Gun Ri over a period of three days. This book delves further
into the "larger human story" of the events, well establishing the terror
and confusion of the South Korean refugees, caught up in a war they did not
understand. The reconstruction is less effective from the American side.
Relative to the number of alleged participants, U.S. interviewees are few.
(A high proportion, the authors find, suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder.) The authors take pains to establish the men of No Gun Ri as
dropouts and throwaways - teenage rejects of a postwar society obsessed
with prosperity and anti-communism. That in turn makes it easier to show
them, as well as the Korean civilians, as victims of a government that sent
them to Korea to fight a civil war on the side of squalid local tyranny.
That perspective is defensible but, experts might argue, scarcely
definitive.
This volume, with its focus on personal experience, is correspondingly best
understood as advocacy reportage, eschewing critical analysis by
concentrating on the victims on both sides of the rifles.
(Sept. 6) Forecast: Readers shocked by reports of the incident will pick up
this follow-up, while an eight-city author tour should bring the story to
further corners. But with U.S.-North Korean relations apparently under
control, the book probably won't benefit from current political notice. "
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Regards, Gernilee
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