Yankee Go Home

Eating with the Enemy

How I Waged Peace with North Korea from My BBQ Shack in Hackensack

by Robert Egan
and Kurt Pitzer
St. Martin’s, 400 pp., $25.99

Gringo Nightmare

A Young American Framed
for Murder in Nicaragua

by Eric Volz
St. Martin’s, 304 pp., $25.99

What better way is there to see into our national character than to follow some callow Americans as they go among foreigners? Armed with our Yankee pragmatism and idealism, our earnestness, pluck, and love of the underdog, we manage to get ourselves in some interesting scrapes out there.

Robert “Bobby” Egan burned with a desire to change the world precisely because he supported the underdog: namely, himself. This “kid from the wrong side of town” set about defanging the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea so he could teach those elite experts in Washington what a North Jersey burger chef and high school dropout can accomplish when he tries. Thus, do we add him to the long line of American businessmen—Averell Harriman, say, or Armand Hammer—who have adorned themselves in the mantle of statesmen? Of course, when you do diplomacy all by yourself while holding down a full-time job as a restaurateur you don’t try to compete with the State Department’s outreach to front-rank countries. What Egan specialized in was chatting up representatives of isolated regimes—Vietnam, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—or, as he calls them, “a bunch of rejects, just like me.” Not being on friendly terms with the United States, he says, means unpopularity in the diplomatic corps, “so when I come along with dinner plans and tickets to the game, it’s tempting.”