Korean Report

An energetic, fast-paced trip through the rapidly changing world of Korean cuisine by the author of Eating Viet Nam. Journalist, world traveler, and avid eater Graham Holliday has sampled some of the most exotic and intriguing cuisines around the globe. On a pilgrimage throughout the whole of South Korea to unearth the real food eaten by locals, Holliday discovers a country of contradictions, a quickly developing society that hasn’t decided whether to shed or embrace its culinary roots. Devotees still make and consume classic Korean dishes in traditional settings even as the cuisine modernizes in unexpected ways and the phenomenon of Korean people televising themselves eating (mok-bang) spreads ever more widely. Amid a changing culture that’s simultaneously trying to preserve what’s best about traditional Korean food while opening itself to a panoply of global influences and balancing new and old, tradition and reinvention, the real and the artificial, Holliday seeks out the most delicious dishes in the most authentic settings—even if he has to prowl in back alleys to find them and convince reluctant restaurant owners that he can handle their unusual flavors. Holliday samples sundae (blood sausage); beef barbecue; bibimbap; Korean black goat; wheat noodles in bottomless, steaming bowls; and the ubiquitous kimchi, discovering the exquisite, the inventive, and, sometimes, the downright strange. Animated by Graham Holliday’s warm, engaging voice, Eating Korea is a vibrant tour through one of the world’s most fascinating cultures and cuisines.

The 2020 Commission report on the North Korean nuclear attacks against the United States posits that there was a nuclear attack against the U.S. on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened

This report, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, was done by an Independent Task Force on Managing Change on the Korean Peninsula. Noting that the new Republic of Korea government has taken steps to open North Korea to broader contacts with the outside world while asserting that it will brook no military aggression from the North, the Task Force recommends a parallel and supportive approach for U.S. policy.

This “brilliantly conceived” novel imagines a devastating nuclear attack on America and the official government report of the calamity (Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control). “The skies over the Korean Peninsula on March 21, 2020, were clear and blue.” So begins this sobering report by the Commission on the Nuclear Attacks against the United States, established by Congress and President Donald J. Trump to investigate the horrific events of the following three days. An independent, bipartisan panel led by nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis, the commission was charged with finding and reporting the relevant facts, investigating how the nuclear war began, and determining whether our government was adequately prepared. Did President Trump and his advisers understand North Korean views about nuclear weapons? Did the tragic milestones of that fateful month—North Korea's accidental shoot-down of Air Busan flight 411, the retaliatory strike by South Korea, and the tweet that triggered vastly more carnage—inevitably lead to war? Or did America’s leaders have the opportunity to avert the greatest calamity in the history of our nation? Answering these questions will not bring back the lives lost in March, 2020. It will not rebuild New York, Washington, or the other cities reduced to rubble. But at the very least, it might prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from occurring again. It is this hope that inspired The 2020 Commission Report. “I couldn’t put the book down, reading most of it in the course of one increasingly intense evening. If fear of nuclear war is going to keep you up at night, at least it can be a page-turner.”—New Scientist