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It's not hard to understand why Koreans describe their lives as han, which means living with a great and sustained sorrow. In the 20th century alone, they endured a 35 year Japanese military occupation, one of the most brutal civil wars in history, and decades of occupation by rival superpowers.

Yet the story of this hauntingly beautiful, mountainous land is not ultimately one of war and devastation. The Koreas: A Global Studies Handbook tells the story of a warm and generous people who have retained their distinctive language and culture despite repeated foreign occupations, achieved a literacy rate of almost 100 percent, outscored nearly every other nation in science and math, and reshaped their devastated post-war economy into one of the four tigers of Asian economic growth.