Recent book
Success Will Come If One Follows True Desires
Lee Kyung-yoon; Money Plus; 153 pp., 13,000 won
This is the success story of Yoon Song-yee, vice president and chief strategy officer of NCsoft, Korea_lading online games
company renowned for a series of hits with Lineage, City of Heroes and Aion. She is what one may call 'theorean Marissa Mayer,' the vice president of Location and Local Services at Google and largely regarded as the public face of the multinational Internet and software corporation.
They are both smart, good-looking, and on the fast lane at a successful technology company. The author, who has written several books on self-motivation, says that she wrote this book particularly for young women who are having a hard time getting or keeping a job.
The 37-year-old is a familiar public figure here, better known as the 'genius girl' who received her doctorate from MIT in the United States at the age of 24. She subsequently made headlines when she joined SK Telecom, one of the nation's telecommunication giants, as a vice president when she was only 28. One of the shortcomings about this book is that the author has no direct contact, like one-on-one interviews, with Yoon. Her main sources seem to be previous news stories and interviews. There are no photos tracing Yoon's life, as this is not an official biography of one of Korea's IT leaders.
―Do Je-hae
Health Hacks: How to Invest in Health for the Survival of a Businessperson
Hiroshi Kawada; translated into Korean by Choi Jee-young; Salim Publishing; 288pp., 12,000 won
Physical fitness and health are important for a businessperson to succeed. Health is indispensable in order for office people to produce satisfactory results and get promotion at work. A businessperson who leads a hectic life needs a routine to stay fit, preferably one that can produce maximum effects with limited time.
This book offers useful tips on how to stay fit, based on the author's own experience. The author is a doctor of Medicine and an associate professor for the Department of Hematology and Oncology at Tokai University School of Medicine and works for the Anti-Aging Health Check-Up System at Tokai University Tokyo Hospital.
Some of the tips the author offers are 30 minutes a day on a household treadmill; using a juicer to take in a large amount of vegetables and fruits; and setting up an arrangement to sleep well, among others.
Korean Contemporary Art
Miki Wick Kim; Prestel; 192pp.,$60
This hardcover volume introduces 30 contemporary Korean artists. Written in English, the colorful book offers succinct descriptions of the creative minds who have garnered both national and international acclaim such as Suh Do-ho and Chun Kwang-young.
Each section starts with a half-page summary of the individual and includes about five pages of images. The text-to-image ratio makes the book a convenient and easy recap of the key points of Korean art today.
Ranging from painters to sculptors and performance artists, the book covers diverse bodies of work as well as ongoing trends and experiments in each genre of art.
In addition, the book includes timelines indicating every artist's major solo and group exhibitions. The author is the director of Miki Wick Kim Contemporary Art in Zurich, Switzerland.
―Noh Hyun-gi
The Man Who Walks Dogs
Jeon Min-sik; EH Book: 293 pp., 12,000 won
A once promising young consultant falls for a beautiful industrial spy and loses everything overnight. This novel, a winner of the Segye Literary Award, begins from a seemingly cliched, movie-like premise, but surprisingly grips the reader throughout with its realism and astute observation of human psychology and emotions.
The author, who had long worked as a ghost writer and has finally published under his own name, crafts a fine story by taking readers into the aftermath of a storm, as it shows what happens when someone hits rock bottom. The protagonist is blacklisted from reentering any respectable white collar job and is forced to take on menial tasks from washing grills at a barbeque restaurant to finally, as the book's title suggests, becoming a dog walker.
Unable to let go of his past, he keeps his distance from co-workers, yet at the same time he applies his polished consulting skills to his work. Things take a turn for the better when he begins walking a rich woman's treasured Tibetan Mastiff, for a jaw-dropping amount of money that enables him to live a comfortable life once again.
―Lee Hyo-won