No figure stands as prominently in the history of the Republic of Korea as Park Chung Hee. This much-awaited volume puts Park under Carter Eckert's careful scrutiny, tracing for the first time in English Park's early years when he served in the Japanese military. At a time when the memory politics of Park's rule have reached a fever pitch and become embroiled in the recent impeachment of his daughter, Eckert's nuanced equanimity is most welcome. Like all good biographies, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea tells us much more than about just its protagonist.

Park presents biographers with a distinct challenge. As a military man, Park seems to have had little literary bent, despite a stint as an elementary school teacher. In these years, he produced few personal writings—no diary or extensive sets of letters – that would allow Eckert to write the type of personal, detailed account that has become such a norm among biographies in recent years. In response to this paucity of records, Eckert broadens his focus, examining less the individual than what he calls “the milieu” of Park's formative years. This is lucky for us, since the result is not a conventional biography but an in-depth and layered examination of the culture and regimens of the military academies—both the Japanese Military Academy and the Manchurian Military Academy—in which Park trained.

This is only possible because Eckert is arguably the most accomplished hunter of historical materials in the modern Korean field. Readers should not expect any grand theory in this book. Rather this study is an empirical tour de force, taking readers from the military thought of the late Chosŏn dynasty down to Park's highly regimented training. With utmost fastidiousness, Eckert introduces us to the early militarization at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We learn about the ethnic and national politics of having Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese integrated into the same military academies where socialist sympathies lay side by side with fascist commitments. And Eckert makes palpable for today's reader the twisted violence of the daily training regime of the Imperial Army. Most remarkably, Eckert somehow located by my count thirty-two military academy graduates, weaving their anecdotes and memories together to enliven his account. While some interviewees recall personal encounters with Park—one remembers Park as “crazy serious” (baka majime, p. 103)—Eckert uses others to capture the atmosphere of the academies, such as when the same interviewee reveals the trauma still affecting him decades after his training (p. 309).

Many readers will be familiar with the main argument of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea, namely that extensive continuities existed between the late colonial era and South Korean developmental growth in the 1960s. Eckert's previous work in the economic realm—in particular, Offspring of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991)—helped ensure that the issue of colonial legacies has been central to modern Korean history. In this monograph, Eckert has offered easily the most sustained treatment of this historical argument, in this case privileging the martial “orientations” developed in the 1940s for creating what he calls “templates of victory.” Based on “internalized models of army life,” these templates were to shape “national governance” in the post-liberation southern peninsula (p. 3). They acted “as a kind of unwritten, tacitly understood general framework of governance from beginning to end” (p. 4). Eckert announces on page two that this argument will not be complete until his planned second volume covering the post-1945 period, which gives this book a guessing game sense of “how will the author carry this forward?”

At times Eckert tips his hand, as he sprinkles the cases in this first volume with foreshadowing of what is to come: reverence for the memory of the mutiny of February 26 in the military academies offers a rationale for Park's 1961 coup d’état (pp. 201–10), the anti-capitalism of the imperial army foretells Park's later distrust and control of the chaebŏl (chap. 6), and the famous “can-do” spirit of the 1960s has its precedents in the military's doctrine of the offensive (pp. 236–63)—to name just a few. What Eckert will do with other elements of his account as he shifts into the post-1945 period is less clear. He shows that these same “templates of victory” cultivated an aggressive, violent form of masculinity; will this, too, be an integral legacy in a gendered account of the development state? He writes of the significance of anti-communism; how will he deal with the rise of North Korea, which had an equally important but divergent “military orientation” and constituted one-half of the “modern Korea” in his title?

Whatever the specific answers, Eckert has rightly returned the relationship between the military and the modern to the core of any understanding of Korea's long twentieth century. Let us hope we will not be guessing for long to see how this craftsman of a historian will handle the even more contentious years of Park's military rule.