A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do (ECW Press, 2016), by Alex Gillis, takes readers into the dynasties of two founders of the martial art: Choi Hong-Hi, who named the art, and his nemesis, Kim Un-Yong, who developed the Olympic style and became a powerful, corrupt official man in international sports. The story starts with Choi at a poker game in 1938 (when he fought for his life), to high-class geisha houses in the 1950s (when the art was named) and into the Vietnam War in the 1960s (where the martial art evolved into a killing art).
In the 1970s, Korean secret services and dictatorships dominated large parts of the sport. Full-blown assassination attempts didn’t take place until the 1980s, and limitless corruption and gangsterism blossomed in the 1990s and the 2000s. Looking at the art’s history and the driven pioneers who created it, you could say that Tae Kwon Do is a martial art for the twenty-first century, an art of merciless techniques, indomitable men and justice pumped on steroids.
Excerpt #1 :“Kafka would have cried: The East Berlin Incident”