Lee Seock-koo, head of Starbucks Korea, has received a presidential medal for the coffee chain’s efforts to provide equal workplace opportunities for people with disabilities, the company said Wednesday.The CEO was given the award at an annual convention to promote employment of the disabled. It was organized by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and the state-run Korea Employment Agency for the Disabled.Starbucks Korea CEO Lee Seock-koo (right) receives a presidential medal from Labor Ministe

Exhibition highlights photographs of ‘gut’ by Kim Soo-nam and his lifelong dedication to capturing the fading tradition

“Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939”　By Adam Hochschild　Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (464 pages, $30)　The Spanish civil war, which ran from 1936 to 1939, is most notable to historians for how it foreshadowed the horrors of World War II.　Yet few distant conflicts are so burned into our culture and consciousness.　Ernest Hemingway, who covered the war, made it the setting of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “the best goddamn book” he ever wrote. George Orwell, who fought in i

STOCKHOLM (AFP) -- American children’s author Meg Rosoff on Tuesday won the 2016 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for young people’s literature, the organization announced.　“Meg Rosoff’s young adult novels speak to the emotions as well as the intellect. In sparkling prose, she writes about the search for meaning and identity in a peculiar and bizarre world,” the jury said in its statement. 　Rosoff was born in Boston in 1956, attended Harvard University and later published her first book “How I Liv

NEW YORK (AP) -- Even for someone as loved as Tina Fey, a reported $6 million advance seemed like a lot of money for a book of essays. 　But five years after its publication, “Bossypants” has sold 3.75 million copies, according to Little, Brown and Co. And it confirmed a market for smart, funny nonfiction such as Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please” and Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”　In an email interview Tuesday with the Associated Press, Fey discussed “Bossypants” and some books she

“Dimestore: A Writer’s Life” 　By Lee Smith　Algonquin Books (202 pages, $24.95)　Lee Smith’s parents raised her to leave the Appalachian town of Grundy, Virginia, where they “were closed in entirely, cut off from the outside world by our ring of mountains.”　They taught her proper grammar, sent her to school with delicate lunches instead of the cornbread and buttermilk she wanted, packed her off every summer to Birmingham, Alabama, for “lady lessons.”　None of this really worked.　Smith adored her ho

　“High Dive” 　By Jonathan Lee 　Knopf (336 pages, $25.95)　Jonathan Lee’s new novel “High Dive” reimagines the weeks leading up to the Grand Hotel bombing on Oct. 12, 1984.　Splitting time between Brighton, England, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lee focuses the attention not on Margaret Thatcher, the intended target of the attack, nor other political figures at the Conservative Party Conference, but on the lives of three individuals.　The narrative opens with Dan’s initiation into the Irish Republi

“The Caped Crusade” by Glen Weldon　Simon & Schuster (325 pages, $26)　Batman has been a lot of things during the past 77 years: a gun-toting vigilante, an object of panic at the height of American homophobia, a campy ’60s television icon, a grumbly middle-aged antihero and a mass media star.　But through all of these iterations, what has given Batman his longevity? The answer lies in the pages of “The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture” by Glen Weldon, a sharp, deeply knowledgeable

BEIJING (AP) -- Stuffed into a tiny room off an alleyway are items that Wang Jinming readily admits were put out with the garbage: Paper string, a needle holder, a metal pancake maker built for thrusting into a fire.　"These objects all look quite old and shabby," he said. "But they record real history."　Wang's Beijing Old Items Exhibition in the heart of old Beijing is one of dozens of private museums that dot the capital’s backstreets and its suburbs. Their collections feature the grand and mun

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AFP) -- The director of Russia’s renowned Hermitage Museum, which has an important collection of sculptures from Palmyra, has offered its expertise to help restore the ancient Syrian city retaken by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from the Islamic State group.　“Restoring Palmyra is the responsibility of all of us,” Mikhail Piotrovsky told AFP, surrounded by displays of tombstones, sculptures and coins from Palmyra at the museum in St. Petersburg.　Following the IS campa

LONDON (AP) -- It’s only rock ‘n’ roll -- but it isn’t, is it? 　The music business is about commerce as well as entertainment, and the Rolling Stones are one of its biggest multinational firms.　There’s plenty of both art and business in “Exhibitionism,” a vast exhibition that covers 1,850 square meters of London’s Saatchi Gallery with five decades of Stones history. 　The more than 500 artifacts, borrowed from the band’s archive and private collectors, include musical instruments, lyrics, sketche