Book Review Compilation

It's been some time since I wrote my last review, and I blame the A-levels and the busyness of life in Korea for such a crime. It's been an experience between heaven and hell for my reading life, because I could borrow from so many books in the public libraries, books which were ALL Korean. But then, I needed to increase my proficiency in Korean, so off I went.

최병구 - 외교이야기
This was a book that I bought from a bookstore. The reason I why I bought it was I wanted to be enlightened about the career which I hoped to take: diplomacy. It wasn't exactly a phenomenal experience, but I learnt a lot, rather boringly, how diplomats worked(all those conferences, summits, embassy work and so on) and how important the selection of words was for diplomats. It also introduced me to many great people in the world of diplomacy, such as Zhou Enlai, about whom I plan to read in the near future. I must say that it was a little too nationalistic(praising hanryu and such) for my taste, but I guess it's inevitable given he is a public servant.

박노자 - 박노자의 만감일기
This was interesting. The author to begin with was interesting; a Russian who changed his nationality to Korean. The book is a collection of his blog posts which mainly talk about the Korean politics. He is very very left, and although I am not sure whether this is a good thing for me, I think I became left too. He changed how I viewd capitalism, democracy and socialism, and led me to think that Socialist Revolution had a good cause. He gave me insight into the Korean politics, how it is literally controlled by Samsung and the like, demonizing them. Although I'm not sure whether I entirely agree with his rhetoric, I certainly find him fascinating.

Leander Kahney - Inside Steve's Brain
Unfortunately this was in Korean too, but I needed some good topics to write about in my SAT essay, so I picked up this book. I thought that it was a balanced approach to Job's personality(maybe slightly on the favourable side) and told me how his perfectionism, ability to change his personality as the situation demands and his hunger for the control of the system led Apple to rise above the others. But somehow I cannot escape my first impression of him, when I watched him give a graduation speech at Stanford, which I thought was rather fake. I just can't find him "charismatic"... but maybe I'm wrong. I guess there's a reason why the workers in Apple all fear and respect him, as the book says(or is the book exaggerating?).