As a sometime student of Korea, I bought this book specifically because I wanted to have one book that could give me a solid grounding in modern Korean history in a digestible format, and "Brothers at War" does that splendidly. Jager starts at the end of the second World War, but does reach further back to the colonial period a few times to add context.
The period between the Japanese surrender and the Korean War is given some attention; I would have preferred a bit more depth but she hits on most of the important points that the average American might not know, such as the level of violence that existed before the official start of the Korean War, how things fell out with People's Republic of Korea (the provisional government set up by Koreans after the Japanese surrender but before the Allies showed up), and so on.
Jager's treatment of the war itself is pretty good. I saw at least one reviewer comment that there was not enough detail of important battles - for me there was perhaps too much. Although I have no doubt that many battles and military actions were potential turning points for the war, it got to a point where I felt the author was just listing battles that happened and making less of an effort to fit them into the context of domestic US opinion on the war, and the politics and diplomacy taking place concurrently with the war. The sections on civilian casualties caused by each side and the POW situations, on the other hand, were very interesting and useful in trying to fit the Korean War into a larger picture of the Cold War and American public opinion.
The chapters following the end of the Korean War had a peculiar flow to some extent, but I thought it worked. In a introductory lecture on North-South relations, for example, I've heard speakers move from the Korean War and just touch on each of the various provocations, like the logging murders or the hijacking (which, by the way, I don't remember seeing at all in this book - I'll have to go back and look for it), and then move quickly to the subject of nuclear North Korea. I enjoyed that Jager took some time to cover the various changes of administration in South Korea and how that affected SK policy and consequently North-South relations. Similarly, Jager takes a fairly lengthy detour into Sino-Soviet relations at one point, but did a good job making it all relevant to the subject at hand.
The recent release of this book is fortunate in that the author is able to include some thoughts on the Kim Jong-Un rise to power. Likewise she is able to speak to recent developments in the China-DPRK relationship, and posits that China is maneuvering to make a historical claim for Koguryo as a Chinese nation, and by extension that North Korea is historically Chinese land. An interesting thought.
In conclusion, I don't think this book is a full military history, nor a full history of South or North Korean politics. I think it is what Jager said it was - a good look at the "unending" Korean War, which draws from all of the places necessary to have a deeper understanding of it.
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CASSINI24
Insightful and engaging study of the Korean War and its aftermath
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2016