SEAA Reads

Seeing like a Child , Inheriting the Korean War by Clara Han (Fordham U. Press) The fall book club was hosted by Nan Kim for the ten colleagues across several time zones. With the prospect of the author joining the online discussion after the first hour an innovation was to invite readers to send in a question or impression to the host ahead of time so the author would have a sense of the group. One of the recurring topics in those responses was “inheritance” (emotional, cultural, familial, historical, and so on), which also formed the subtitle to the book. The main title points to the mode of absorbing one’s surroundings and forming ideas about how this world works - not with neat categories, published theories, or other grown-up methods, but in the emergent way that a child’s understanding and level of trust shapes the subject at hand. In other words, much of the book is formative rather than summative; more participant than observation. Readers, much as the author herself, grow page...