Sandwiched between the highs of WWII and the lows of Vietnam, the Korean War seems now largely forgotten. Yet the consequences of that bloody intervention continue to spew forth like political lava from some seething, half-buried caldron. Vietnam had a popular fallout, but the issues and events of distant Korea remain largely unknown to generations who cut their teeth on the Tet Offensive and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Halliday - Cumings book represents a sturdy short bridge spanning that gap, beginning with the star-crossed events of 1945 and ending with the ill-fated Geneva Conference of 1954. In between is a story of almost unrelieved devastation and dashed hopes for the Korean people. Those looking for a detailed history of the war itself should look elsewhere, while those looking for historical perspective should definitely pick up the book. There's a scholarly detachment here that favors neither side, but one that also exposes many suppressed facts about America's involvement with a tarnished South Korean ally. Unstated yet implied by most histories, including this one, is a single overriding fact. The regime in South Korea, with its history of collaboration with hated Japan, lacked from the outset a strong popular base, and was thus militarily and politically weaker than its nationalist albeit communist rival in the North. Thus the South could only survive through outside intervention, which it got, in this case successfully. Nevertheless, parallels with the unpopular French-collaborating regime in South Vietnam could not be more obvious, nor the tragic dynamics more similar.

Published in 1988 before the Soviet bloc's collapse, the latter part of the book is now somewhat dated. Still and all, I don't think anyone can understand modern American history or its global role without sober works like this one, and don't let the many bleakly revealing photographs that intersperse the text fool you. This is a book of considerable depth, more akin to the pioneering research of I.F. Stone, than to the glossy pages of a Life magazine. In many ways, as recent events have shown, the events of that time are still trailing blood and threaten to erupt again at any moment. It's best to be informed.

This work is much shorter and easier to read than the gigantic double-volume "The Origins of the Korean War" (Vols. I & II), also by Bruce Cummings. This book is a must for any school or university library. It is also an important addition to the available literature in the English language about the Korean War. Halliday and Cummings give the reader a very good overview of the DOMESTIC KOREAN situation that resulted in the war. This is the information that is so desparately needed (and so consistently absent from mosts texts on the topic) to understand the war in its totality. IF YOU ARE A VET, OR ARE INTERESTED IN THIS TOPIC, OR IN THIS ERA OF US HISTORY, OR IN THE FIELD OF FOREIGN POLICY, I CANNOT GIVE A HIGHER RECOMMENDATION. I am an amateur historian who focuses mostly on 20th C. Korean history. This book, in addition to other, more well-known books that deal with the chrononlogy and individual battles of the war, are excellent sources of information on this topic. YOU MUST OWN THIS BOOK!

The book is good, but I would have loved to have more in depth study. Perhaps some day the biography of this director will come

A series of interviews that Jon Halliday carried out with Sirk in his later years. The interviews are broken into six periods-- Sirk's German Theater period; the German film period; the exile years in Switzerland, France and Holland; his two American periods and finally the time after his biggest Hollywood successes.

Sirk is a tremendously important cinema director, and the interviews give a lot of clarity to his history and how he went about choosing the subject matter that he did. Halliday also provides a brief biographical introduction and a biofilmography and Sirk bibliography. A must-have for cinephiles and fans of Douglas Sirk.

Enver Hoxha was never a hero of mine. For most of my life I've been fascinated by Albania, its culture, history, music, and literature, but thanks to him I could only visit the country of my fascination in 1996. I found it in sorry shape, again thanks to this son of a landowning family who returned from studying in France and Belgium to be a teacher and subsequently to lead the Communist Partisans against the fascist invaders during World War II. Hoxha prepared for his takeover by fighting with the non-Communist Albanian resistance just as often as with the Italians and Germans. Remaining in power from 1944 to his death in 1985, this Balkan despot eventually quarreled with every power that aided him---Yugoslavia, the USSR, and China---and became ever more paranoid, never leaving Albania for the last 25 years of his life. It is not too much to say that Hoxha and his policies utterly ruined Albania, even if he kept it from being swallowed by greedy neighbors. He murdered, imprisoned, terrified, and kept ignorant an entire people. Seven years after his death, the whole country lay destitute, destroyed, desperate. Albania has had to begin from scratch. What has such a man got to say for himself ?

THE ARTFUL ALBANIAN is an edited version of the many volumes-long memoirs of Enver Hoxha. Of course, it is possible that what Jon Halliday has not put into the present volume is as revealing as what he has. I rather doubt it though. Whatever the case, he has certainly gathered a number of interesting sections, connected by intelligent commentary. I found the book fascinating for what it revealed about this dictator of a 'people's democracy" which, in the end, did not rise far above the Balkan dictatorships of the past. Hoxha emerges as more intelligent and discerning than many world leaders, certainly more than most leaders produced by the Communist "bloc" after World War II. He is at is best in criticizing the vainglorious amassing of the trappings of power of other leaders, in divulging the hypocrisies of the worker states. No word about his own foibles of course. There are a large number of interesting conversations between Eastern bloc leaders complete with open threats and farting dogs, and the intricacies of his relationship with China. Hoxha was a man who can casually speak of "liquidation" of a man or a class without the slightest qualm. In the end he killed his closest ally, Mehmet Shehu, and denounced him as a Western agent. Hoxha's last words in the book are "..the walls of our fortress are of unshakeable granite rock." The pitiful, crumbling concrete pillboxes that dot Albania today, around half a million of them, give a more accurate picture of Hoxha's achievement.

If you are interested in knowing something about Hoxha, about his view of what he did and whom he met, and if you don't mind a fair bit of the old "party line" along the way, (from the horse's mouth) then by all means read this book. For anyone who wants to know what crushed Albania, why it's in the mess that it's in, this book is a good place to start.