Month: March 2008

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens

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I rarely inhale books, but today was one of those days. I whipped through this book, disillusioned — who’d have thought I could be more disillusioned than I had been? — yet not really surprised. Doubtless, some interpreted this text as an attack on Mother Teresa, but if you read it carefully, it’s much more an attack on the media — conservative and liberal alike — that, during the woman’s life, glossed over major issues in her work and beliefs, issues that the majority of human beings would probably take issue with if presented directly, and beatified Mother Teresa in …

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I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young Ha Kim (Translated by Chi-Young Kim)

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Having read and very much enjoyed the Portable Korean Library translation of “The Photo-Shop Murders” and especially “Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator,” I went into this book expecting something dark, funny, and entertainingly disturbing. Kim scores on about half of those expectations: this “novel” (at 120 pages, it’s more of a novella, really) is somewhat disturbing and rather dark. There are entertaining and funny moments, but I was in fact a little bewildered by the book. It certainly didn’t seem to me to be written by the same person who’d written “Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck …

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Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth

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I’ve decided to stop doing the “bookdumps” I’ve been doing, where I briefly review a ton of books, and instead give individual reviews — however brief they might sometimes be — their own individual posts. I’m starting with the Hawai’i Studies on Korea series hardback Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth, an academic text about the history of education, attitudes towards it, and its development in South Korea. This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in …

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Seumniette?

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I’m somewhat mystified, but had to share: Lime just informed me that, among Korean fans of the TV series Lost, in online discussions the character Juliette, is (sometimes: see the comment section) referred to as 슴리에트 “슴리엣”, which for those of you who can’t read Hangeul sounds like “Seumniette.” The “n” sound is a liason between the m in “Seum” and the “l” in “-liette,” so the latter half of the name, “-liette” obviously taken from the character’s name, but “seum” requires a little explanation if you don’t speak Korean. It’s the second half of the word “gaseum” (which could …

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Hwansang Teukgeup

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I think I spelled that right. Tonight, Lime and I were riffing on the theme songs of TV shows we watched as kids. She recognized far more of mine than I did of hers, which is only to be expected — English-language media got aired here more than Japanese or Korean shows got aired in Canada (with the notable exception of Astroboy, and, technically, Sailor Moon, though the latter came onto TV — or returned to TV, maybe? — only when I was too cool for cartoons). Anyway, amid us singing the theme songs for the Smurfs, the Flintstones (“They …

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