The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: I always love a good immigrant story: a tale of a young person, transplanted from the “old country” and learning the ropes (and usually teaching them to her parents) in the new. But journalist Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool is that familiar tale’s obverse: at age 12, the Chicago-born American moved with her parents back to the South Korea of their birth. And like the displaced Hong herself, the Korea of 1985 grew up fast: it became, in short order, the nation of Samsung, of newly wealthy executives, and now, Hong contends, it has become the crown prince of Asian pop culture. A kind of memoir of a culture as well as of an individual life, Hong’s first nonfiction book (she previously wrote the novel Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners) mixes personal memoir with interviews and research to produce a rollicking, delightful, wise-guy story of how both she and her ancestral home became the cultural icons they are today. --Sara Nelson