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Undiplomatic Memoirs (Century lives & letters)

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The author is a U.S. diplomat assigned to watch things in Korea right around the time of Theodore Roosevelt, and he reports what he sees: Russian and German spies plying for advantage, and the weak hereditary monarchy of Korea creaking toward collapse in the face of the modern world.

Sands gives us some cogent historicism on the origins of the Koreans, Japanese and Chinese, and in general he seems to have accomplished convincing us that as an American diplomat, he can function as the same high level of urbanity and effectiveness as an Englishman.

Things get tense, and the Koreans want him to work as a kind of private advisor to the Hereditary loser-class, but Washington has other ideas, and the book ends with Sands departing this fascinating part of the world and wondering aloud what other intriguing assignment he might be able to find next.

So what was Korea before the war of North and South in the 1950s; before the Japanese overlords were blown apart by the U.S. in WW II; and before the Japanese overran the place, grabbed all the big houses, built huge industrial businesses, enslaved the locals and raped all the women before that? This book gets beneath these generalities and overstatements, and gets us part of that anterior answer.