As Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight filled with untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, massacres and atrocities. He incisively ties America's current foreign policy back to this remarkably violent war that killed as many as four million Koreans, two thirds of whom were civilians.

The course of the war -- The party of memory -- The party of forgetting -- Culture of repression -- 38 degrees of separation : a forgotten occupation -- "The most disproportionate result" : the air war -- The flooding of memory -- A "forgotten war" that remade the United States -- Requiem : history in the temper of reconciliation.