No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. The author's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon...

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.