Book Reviews205 writer's experience, particularly helpful in advising on the most relevant material to see. In conclusion, this volume is greatly to be welcomed. It gives a comprehensive survey of the Korean conflict and incorporates the latest research findings. The focus is strongly on American perceptions , but it would have been useful had there been more on both parts of Korea and how they evolved after 1945. There are, however, considerable problems in analyzing decisions in P'yongyang, Moscow, and Peking. Other aspects that ideally might have been covered would include the role of the United Nations itself before and after June 25, 1950, with reference to constituent bodies and secretariat. More might have been made of relations between the United States, Britain and the Commonwealth, and France. The extent of the friction in Anglo-American relations at various times, notably in December 1950-January 1951, is well worthy of study; the British archives in the Public Record Office, London (Kew) contain a great deal of interest in this context. It is, however, impossible for all these areas to be pursued and we may look forward to the future conferences—and their proceedings—in which these and other topics will be discussed. Bruce Cumings is to be congratulated on having edited an outstanding collection. This is one of the most important works to have appeared on the Korean war and will do much to clarify aspects that have been obscure hitherto. Peter Lowe Manchester University The Fall of Syngm^n Rhee By Quee-Young Kim [Kwi-yöng Kim]. Research Monograph, no. 7. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies , University of California, 1983. He who is not a radical at twenty does not have a heart; he who is still one at forty does not have a head. S. ??. Lipset1 The questions run a familiar gamut: Was it an "incident" (sakön)? Was it an "episode" (sabhwa) ? Was it a righteous "uprising" (üigö)? Was it a "revolution" (hyöngmyöng)? Their focus is Sailgu, the massive protest 1. Quoted in Ellis S. Kmuss, Japanese Radicals Revisited: Student Protest in Post-War Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. xi. 206Book Reviews movement of April 19, 1960, that brought down the discredited government of Syngman Rhee.2 A satisfactory resolution of the uncertainty underlined by the questions has remained elusive until now because in all public discussions on the upheaval facts have often become hopelessly obscured by the divergent social and political perspectives and the intellectual and moral sympathies of the actors, witnesses, and analysts involved. Romantic popular images of the day, tenaciously held and assiduously preserved, have tended to render the story even more opaque by depicting the whole struggle as an almost epic duel between larger-than-life heroes and unbending villains. Quee-Young Kim's unusual book is the first full-length study in English that seeks to cast light on the meaning and significance of the tragedy that left, among its other consequences, 186 people dead and 1,600 wounded. I call the book unusual advisedly. It is difficult to look at it as a conventional scholarly monograph though it applies scholarly analyses to the subject. On the other hand it would be unfair to describe it as an extended piece ofjournalistic reportage though the reader will easily find that in both substance and style the book often comes close to deserving that label. Rarely does one find in one book, for instance, a structure that puts to work in tandem two styles so diametrically distant from each other as those illustrated by the following examples: Our inquiry into the origin of the mass revolt leads us to conclude, first ofall, that the disjunction between moral standards and the practices ofthose in authority is the most important explanation and source of the political uprising. The most significant social contradiction seems to have been the disjunction between the content of education and the criteria of legitimacy.fP. 209] A few individuals attempted to address the crowd with their own lung power. Silhouetted against a street light, one stood on the roofofa tank, arms waving above his head in 2. The lifeless reductionism that...