cynical writing style [that] paints a convincing picture of the corrupt inner workings of the Korean governments and the unfairness and pretense that govern citizens’ day-to-day lives." Quoted is Moo's remark on the Korean folk musicians he associates with at one point: “How strange a community, always on the brink of falling apart but somehow holding together. Never in my life had I seen a more closely-knit society of enemies.” Korea is described as “a sly backhand artist rather than the gentleman of the Far East victimized by superpower struggle.” Luke concludes: "The title Cry Korea Cry is fitting for the divided and internally scarred factions of North and South Korea." In Magazine: Inside Asian America (Aug/Sept 1999) Peter Ong reviews Cry Korea Cry and praises the “astonishing vision and force [that] succeeds in conveying how human lives become expendable in the sinister politics of war. Pak’s brutal honesty about the human compulsion toward the darker elements of humanity offers us an unsettling, provocative window onto hard truths rather than satisfactory resolutions.” In a review of The Polyglot in the Korean New York Daily (June 1, 2019) Paul Sharar, New York University, notes its "salient and imaginative storyline with its clearly drawn characters” on a global canvas as Korea wakes up to the modern age during the half-century, 1910~1960, beginning with its colonialization by Japan which drives millions of Koreans to Siberia only to be deported by Stalin in 1937 to Central Asia, a holocaust that only a fraction survives. Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945 at the end of WWII results in its division under American and Soviet occupation, which culminates in a 3-year mini-WWIII, wiping out a fifth of the population, which, however, revitalizes the Japanese economy as the sole offshore quartermaster for the US/UN Forces. "Throughout the evolving complexity of the story Peter, born in 1920 in Vladivostok and speaking 16 languages with native fluency due to his forced trials, is pushed into many different leadership roles ... before, during, and after the Korean War," states Sharar. "Then Peter’s identity is shattered, his old Soviet birth certificate turning out to be a fraud." Peter's patriotic poet father Bach assumed to have died in a Soviet gulag has been in the US, teaching literature at an American university, and is now comatose with renal failure after contacting Peter. The kidney transplant campaign to save him leads to the