Reviews 85 and, as Phyllis Grosskurth remarks at the very end, those who experienced it will soon "all be gone." George Woodcock Vancouver, B.C. Youngsook Kim Harvey, Six Korean Women: The Socialization of Shamans . St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1979. 326 pp. $19.95. Shamanism, with the female shaman acting as the entranced medium between the invoked spirits and her trembling clientele, has dominated Korean religious life throughout history. Early records show that up to the Tenth Century shamans were theocrats or held exalted cabinet ranks. The subsequent dynasties adopted Buddhism (A.D. 918-1392) and Confucianism (A.D. 1392-1910) as state religions, proscribing shamanism as superstition. Yet people from the king down to the peasant have turned to the shaman in their hour of real trouble. During this period of official outlawry a king was reported to be possessed by spirits (c. 1500) and a queen openly patronized and organized shamanism (c. 1890) as a national institution. Even in the Twentieth Century , under the joint attack of Christianity, Japanese Shintoism, and modern technological materialism, shamans have thrived as attested by the number of practitioners (better than one in a thousand of the population ); the great following they enjoy; and the unstinted expenditure of cash to obtain their services. Six Korean Women is not concerned with the public side of the shaman , the sociological, anthropological etiology and ethology of shamanism per se, or the description and characterization of its rituals, chants and dances from a comparative religionist's point of view. Youngsook Kim Harvey is interested in the shaman as an individual, as a woman, wife and mother, faced with tremendous personal decisions to make—first when she accepts the shamanic "call" and gets initiated into the order, and thereafter as she is caught between the conflicting demands of her profession as a combination singer-dancer-counselorpriest and those of her home, generally with a horde of dependents, all ostracized because they are her relatives. Harvey's book is the first biographical study of shamanism in English—or any language, including Korean. And it is a worthy beginning. In good, perspicuous prose, with meticulous attention to the relevant detail and local color, yet in clear, bold strokes, the author delineates the recurrent dilemma, the shattering angst of the unique career 86 biography Vol. 4, No. 1 woman. In fact, the shaman's problems are so unique that the author's primary purpose in writing the book—namely, to obtain insights into the strategies of reconciling the work-home opposition with a view to applying them to other career-minded women—is not likely to be realized . In every case the shaman is the virtual head of the household, completely reversing the traditional male dominion (see Appendix B on women and the family in traditional Korea, pp. 253-271). Her authority is absolute and the husband, shunned and unemployable in the outside world, becomes an all-purpose domestic, babysitter and drone. The only way out for an independent, equally professional husband is to escape from his parasitism—as one of the husbands studied by Harvey does by emigrating incognito to America. Such total subjugation and destruction of the male ego and the consequent disruption of the family can hardly be the option desired by "professional" women who choose to have a home. Only in the case of the Pyongyang Shaman do things seem to work. The husband is "always engaged in some sort of cottage industry at home, such as pasting labels on match boxes, or making paper bags of old newspapers for retailers " (p. 89), and the wife, a woman of extraordinary intelligence, tact, and personal beauty, takes constant care to uphold his dignity, deferring to him before the children. She turns over all her earnings to him, so he can dispense money to both herself and the children. Their children receive the highest education and training as medical doctors and nurses—an exceptional achievement under any circumstances but particularly so considering that other shamans' children seldom progress beyond elementary education, as they get taunted and blamed for everything at school. Even the apparent success of the Pyongyang Shaman 's children is unhealthily inverted by the hostile society...