| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Michael Finch. Min Yång-Hwan: A Political Biography. (Hawai'i Studies on Korea.) Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press and Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai'i. 2002. Pp. xii, 256. $45.00.

Few incidents in the history of early twentieth-century Korea have garnered as much attention as the suicide of the official, Min Yång-Hwan. Recounted in textbooks and represented in national history museums, Min's suicide has been publicly canonized as the all-too-rare sacrifice of a patriot who acted the way the custodians of the Korean national past wish others had behaved. Yet memory of Min as an exception among an officialdom none too eager to risk opposing Japanese colonization has had the consequence of rendering Min's life all but colorless. Little has been known about this figure whose story has been reduced to the singularity of a dramatic end, an end that in serving as a metonym for the death of a nation has all but erased from public memory what came before. It is to infuse color into Min's life story that Michael Finch has written this biography, using the life of this prominent official "to put across a small part of the Korean side of the story in that nation's painful transition from the nineteenth to twentieth century" (p. 179). The result is a chronological account of Min's life that veers clear of most historiographical debates to give a number of insights into an under-researched period of Korean history.

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