A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

©1987 Simon & Schuster (U.S. Edition) On November 1, 1987, Simon & Schuster published the U.S. edition of  The Korean War, a one-volume history of  a 1950-53 conflict that pitted the United States, South Korea, and 20 member-states against North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and - behind the scenes - Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in a bloody struggle for control of the Korean Peninsula. Written by British historian Max Hastings and originally published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, The Korean War examines the controversial clash of arms that is sometimes known in the U.S. as "the forgotten war" from a British perspective, with a sharp focus on the American, Soviet, and Chinese foreign and defense policies in the early stages of the Cold War that made the war inevitable. In retrospect, the Korean War is eclipsed by the conflict - World War II - that came before it and the one that came after it:  Vietnam. The former was a titanic struggle th...

Cover of the 2000 50th Anniversary Edition. (C) 2000 Da Capo Press On March 21, 1994, Da Capo Press published Robert J. Dvorchak's The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War, a "coffee table" hardcover book about the 1950-1953 Korean War. Based primarily on reporting by AP correspondents and featuring more than 300 photographs from the venerable news service's archives,  The Battle for Korea: The Associated Press History of the Korean War' s first edition hit bookstores a year after the 40th anniversary of the signing of the July 1953 armistice that ended three years of combat on the divided peninsula that lies perilously close to three powerful neighbors: China, Russia, and Japan. Long forgotten by most Americans and famously ignored by popular culture except for a handful of movies ( The Hunters, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Pork Chop Hill, and Battle Hymn )  and the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, the Korean War is also a conflict tha...

(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by  Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward  detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South.  The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for...