Washington Post Book Reviews
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Sunday September 19, 2010
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THE KOREAN WAR: A History
Bruce Cumings
Modern Library
ISBN 978-0-679-64357-9
288 pages
$24
Reviewed by William Stueck
In 1981, Bruce Cumings, now a professor of history at the University of Chicago, became a hero to left-wing thinkers in the United States and South Korea with the publication of the first volume of his massive study on the origins of the Korean War. Indeed, his arguments that the war originated in conflicts internal to the peninsula and that, during its occupation, the United States consistently favored repressive right-wing forces that had collaborated with the Japanese gained currency with a range of scholars. The volume remains a classic in the literature on the Korean War. Since 1981, Cumings has written widely on Korean history and the international politics of northeast Asia, but he has never matched the quality of his first book.
His latest, "The Korean War," does not break that pattern. Designed for the general reading public, the volume begins with a chronological survey of the war's headline events from the military attack of June 25, 1950, by the Soviet-sponsored communist regime in North Korea on the U.S.-sponsored regime in South Korea to the armistice on July 27, 1953. It then provides a series of topical chapters on the civil conflict in Korea before the war, the brutality of the war itself and memories of the war, or lack thereof, in the United States, Korea and Japan. While he provides insights on the perspectives of North Korean leaders and South Koreans of a progressive stripe, his account falters in other areas.
Most important, Cumings displays a limited grasp of sources that have emerged since he published his second volume on the war's origins in 1990. Since then an enormous number of government documents have become available on the roles of the United States, the Soviet Union and China on the origins, course and impact of the war, and historians have produced a substantial new literature devoted to interpreting them. For example, in "Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956" Gregory Mitrovich demonstrates that George F. Kennan's version of containment during 1948 and '49 was not limited to Western Europe and Japan, as Cumings suggests. Mitrovich and others have demonstrated persuasively that the Kennan-drafted National Security Council document 48 provided the rationale for an active if non-military campaign to roll back Soviet power. Cumings' apparent unfamiliarity with this revelation leads him to misinterpret the evolution of American views on the nature of the Soviet threat.
Cumings also ignores evidence from archives in China and Russia that sheds light on the lead-up to North Korea's invasion of the south. Cumings lays emphasis on a Chinese role in the attack, but newly released documents show that Beijing was largely left out of the pre-war planning while Moscow was intimately involved.
Cumings' assertion that the Republic of Korea government in the south was "in total disarray" on the eve of the North Korean attack ignores or downplays the fact that it had recently defeated the guerrilla movement below the 38th parallel and implemented important measures to control inflation and advance land reform. Cumings dwells on the failures of South Korea's army during the war, totally ignoring the contribution the army made to the defense of the Pusan Perimeter and its manning by mid-1952 of over 50 percent of the front line on the United Nations side. Cumings makes some striking omissions, too. He spends considerable space on such topics as the North Korean perspective and American atrocities from 1950-53. He fails, however, to explain U.S. policy during the occupation or describe the eventual emergence of the Republic of Korea as an economically prosperous and democratic state that contrasts dramatically with the economic basketcase and brutal regime in North Korea.
Not surprisingly, Cumings declares that the Korean War was "all for naught," that it "solved nothing." In the sense that it left Korea divided and in a tense state that has lasted to this day, he is right. In other ways, though, he is wide of the mark, as the fighting never resumed on a large scale, the Republic of Korea was saved, and the Western alliance grew and armed itself in a manner that made a great power confrontation less likely. For readers desiring a sermon on the shortcomings of the United States in Korea from World War II to the present, this book is a must read. Those wanting an up-to-date account of the war in all its complexity should look elsewhere.
William Stueck is author of, among other works, "The Korean War: An International History" and "Rethinking the Korean War."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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DELUSIONS OF GENDER: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Cordelia Fine
Norton
ISBN 978-0-393-06838-2
338 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Wray Herbert
About halfway through this irreverent and important book, cognitive psychologist Cordelia Fine offers a fairly technical explanation of the fMRI, a common kind of brain scan. By now, everyone is familiar with these head-shaped images, with their splashes of red and orange and green and blue. But far fewer know what these colors really mean -- or where they come from. It's not as if these machines are taking color videos of the human brain in action -- not even close. In fact, these high-tech scanners are gathering data several steps removed from brain activity, and even further from behavior. They are measuring the magnetic quality of hemoglobin, as a proxy for the blood oxygen being consumed in particular regions of the brain. If this signal is different from what one would expect, scientists slap some color on that region of the map: hot, vibrant colors like red if it's more than expected; cool, subdued colors if it's less.
Fine calls this "blobology." Blobology is the science -- or art -- of creating images and then interpreting them as if they have something to do with human behavior. Fine's detailed explanation of brain scanning technology is essential to her argument, in order to convey a sense of just how difficult it is to interpret such raw data. Fine isn't opposed to neuroscience or brain imaging; quite the opposite. But she is ardently opposed to making authoritative interpretations of ambiguous data. And she's especially intolerant of any intellectual leap from analyzing iffy brain data to justifying a society stratified by gender. Hence her title, "Delusions of Gender," which can be read as an intentional slur on the scientific minds perpetrating this deceit.
Fine gives these scientists no quarter, and it's not just brain scanners. Consider her critique of a widely cited study of babies' eye gaze, conducted when the babies were just 1-1/2 days old. The study found that baby girls were much more likely to gaze at the experimenter's face, while baby boys preferred to look at a mobile. The scientists took these results as evidence that girls are more empathic than boys, who are more analytic than girls -- even without socialization. The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it's a lousy experiment. Fine spends several pages systematically discrediting the study, detailing flaw after flaw in the experimental design. Again, it's a somewhat technical methodological discussion, but an important one, especially since this study has become a cornerstone of the argument that boys and girls have a fundamental difference in brain wiring.
By now, you should be getting a feeling for the tone and texture of this book. Fine offers no original research on the brain or gender here; instead, her mission is to demolish the sloppy science being used today to justify gender stereotypes -- which she labels "neurosexism." She is no less merciless in attacking "brain scams" -- her derisive term for the many popular versions of the idea that sex hormones shape the brain, which then shapes behavior and intellectual ability, from mathematics to nurturance.
Two of her favorite targets are John Gray, author of the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" books, and Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain" and "The Male Brain." Her favorite illustration of Gray's "neurononsense" is his discussion of the brain's inferior parietal lobe, or IPL. The left IPL is more developed in men, the right IPL in women, which for Gray illuminates a lot: This anatomical difference explains why men become impatient when women talk for too long, and also why women are better able to respond to a baby crying at night. Fine dismisses such conclusions as nothing more than "sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery."
Gray has no scientific credentials. Brizendine has no such excuse, having been trained in science and medicine at Harvard, U.C. Berkeley and Yale. Fine saves her big guns -- and her deepest contempt -- for her. For the purposes of this critique, Fine fact-checked every single citation in "The Female Brain," examining every study that Brizendine used to document her argument that male and female brains are fundamentally different. Brizendine cites literally hundreds of academic articles, making the text appear authoritative to the unwary reader. Yet on closer inspection, according to Fine, the cited articles are either deliberately misrepresented or simply irrelevant.
"Neurosexism" is hardly new. Indeed, Fine traces its roots back to the mid-19th century, when the "evidence" for inequality included everything from snout elongation to "cephalic index" (ratio of head length to head breadth) to brain weight and neuron delicacy. Back then, the motives for this pseudoscience were transparently political: restricting access to higher education and, especially, the right to vote. In a 1915 New York Times commentary on women's suffrage, neurologist Charles Dana, perhaps the most illustrious brain scientist of his time, cataloged several sex differences in the brains and nervous systems of men and women, including the upper half of the spinal cord, which, he claimed, proved that women lack the intellect for politics and governance.
None of this was true, of course. Not a single one of Dana's brain differences withstood the rigors of scientific investigation over time. And that is really the main point that Fine wants to leave the reader pondering: The crude technologies of Victorian brain scientists may have been replaced by powerful brain scanners like the fMRI, but time and future science may judge imaging data just as harshly. Don't forget, she warns us, that wrapping a tape measure around the head was once considered modern and scientifically sophisticated. Those seductive blobs of color could end up on the same intellectual scrap heap.
Wray Herbert's book "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits" has just been published.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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