An interpretative history of the Korean War. The text examines the war within the broader context of Korea's history, offering an analysis of the course of the war, and assessing the role of both North and South Korea and the allied forces in the conflict. The study goes beyond the battlefield, to evaluate the contribution of the UN naval forces and the impact of the war on the homefront. Issues such as defectors, opposition to the war, POWs and the media are explored and original research concerning the war's origins and development is incorporated from Soviet archives. This work should prove to be of value to students and scholars of 20th-century history, particularly, those concerned with American and Pacific history.

ROBERT PHALEN Ph.D., co-directs the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He also holds two academic appointments in the College of Health Sciences at UCI: Professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Medicine; and Professor in the Department of Medicine’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. He has served as Chair of both the UCI Institutional Review Board (for Human Studies) and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He is currently a member of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee—Particulate Material, and he is a member of 11 professional scientific associations/societies. In 1971, he obtained a Ph.D. in biophysics, with specialization in inhalation toxicology, from the University of Rochester (in Rochester, NY). His postdoctoral research was conducted at the Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute (now the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute) in Albuquerque, NM. In 1972, Dr. Phalen joined the then College of Medicine at UCI to establish the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory, which still conducts studies relating to the toxicology of air pollutants, and trains graduate students and physicians in inhalation toxicology. His research is in several areas including: predicting doses from inhaled particles; health effects of inhaled air pollutants; and applied aerosol physics. He has published over 100 scientific papers, and authored and/or edited four previous books on aerosol inhalation topics.