Historical books on demand with box office hits

A scene from the movie "The Battleship Island" / Courtesy of 1st Look

By Kim Jae-heun

Historical books featuring stories of current box office hits such as "Dunkirk," "The Battleship Island" and the upcoming "A Taxi Driver" are receiving renewed attention.

As the three biggest highly anticipated films for this summer happen to deal with modern historical events, people are reading the books about these topics as the popular movies.

The book "Dunkirk," by Edward Keble Chatterton, was published on the release date of the film of the same name. Chatterton has delicately described not only the psychological status of soldiers who participated in the biggest withdrawal in history, but also civilians who were at the battlefield.

There are no German soldiers appearing in the war film and not a single man speaks of his own story. The film "Dunkirk" rather focuses on presenting intuitive emotions of soldiers and the people who prayed for survival as the unrelenting bombs fell from the sky into the sea.

Chatterton's "Dunkirk" is written from the perspective of a commander who tells of a miserable situation when one of the Allied Forces, Belgium, almost surrendered and the French army did a lax job of destroying the enemy's major bridge.

The book was written in 1940 by the author who fought in World War One as a British naval officer, and it was published right after the operation successfully evacuated the English troops, leaving Chatterton very excited when he wrote his story.

The novel "The Battleship Island" by Han Soo-san is a masterpiece authored by a university professor who has been researching the modern historical tragedy for 30 years. The story of Korean people forcibly drafted to the man-made island Hashima during the Japanese Colonial Rule became widely known only two years ago when the Japanese government registered Hashima as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015.

The book plainly and accurately describes how the Japanese cruelly forced Koreans to labor while they tried to escape from the island.

The book by popular novelist Hwang Sok-yong, "Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age," is also gaining popularity in bookstores ahead of the eagerly-anticipated film on the Gwangju Democratization Movement, "A Taxi Driver," to be released Wednesday.

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