Catfish and Mandala

Author: Andrew X. Pham
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312267179
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey--a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam--made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

The Cave

Author: Tim Krabbe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374529167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
A stunning psychological thriller about friship, drugs, and murder from the author of The Vanishing. Egon Wagter and Axel van de Graaf met when they were both fourteen and on vacation in Belgium. Axel is fascinating, filled with an amoral energy by which the more prudent, less adventurous Egon is both mesmerized and repelled. Even as a teen, Axel has a strange power over those around him. He defies authority, seduces women, breaks the law. Axel chooses Egon as a friend, a friendship that somehow ures over time and ends up determining Egon's fate. During his university studies, Egon frequents Axel's house in Amsterdam, where there is a party every night and women fill the rooms. Though Egon chooses geology over Axel's life of avarice and drug dealing, he remains intrigued by his friend's conviction that the only law that counts is the law he makes himself. Egon believes that Axel is a demonic figure who tempts others only because he knows they want to be tempted. By the time he is in his forties, Egon finds himself divorced and with few professional prospects. He turns for help to Axel, who sends him to Ratanakiri, a fictional country in Southeast Asia. Axel gives Egon a suitcase to deliver-and Egon never returns. Utterly compelling and resonant, The Cave is an unforgettable story of betrayal in the spirit of Tim Krabbé's remarkable first novel, The Vanishing.

The Eaves of Heaven

Author: Andrew X. Pham
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
From Andrew X. Pham, the award-winning author of Catfish and Mandala, a son's searing memoir of his Vietnamese father's experiences over the course of three wars. Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham's family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the festering French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham's heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon.--From publisher description.

The Sword of Heaven

Author: Mikkel Aaland
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
ISBN: 1609520076
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
“Any attempt at peace must be attended by a knowledge of self,” discovers writer and photographer Mikkel Aaland, who grew up with a bomb shelter for a bedroom, in terror of nuclear war. At the height of the Cold War, Aaland finds himself drawn into a mysterious Shinto priest’s plan to save the world. Traveling from Norway to the Philippines, Iceland to South Africa, he places pieces of a sacred Shinto sword in key power spots around the world. Along the way, he comes face to face with his deepest childhood fears of war and destruction, encounters the compelling and mysterious Shinto religion, struggles with the uncertainties of love, and learns to face life with an open heart. The Sword of Heaven tells the extraordinary true story of a journey in which all boundaries are pushed—geographical, cultural, and personal—and in which the healing of the world and the healing of one man appear to be inextricably linked.

River of Stars

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101608935
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 690

Book Description
“River of Stars is a major accomplishment, the work of a master novelist in full command of his subject.”—Michael Dirda, in The Washington Post “Game of Thrones in China.”—Salon.com Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate. That moment on a lonely road changed his life in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles toward the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north. Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has. In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.

Driven Out

Author: Jean Pfaelzer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520256941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Book Description
This sweeping and groundbreaking work presents the shocking and violent history of ethnic cleansing against Chinese Americans from the Gold Rush era to the turn of the century.

Dispatches

Author: Michael Herr
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307814165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

Haymaker in Heaven

Author: Edvard Hoem
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571319816
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century. The year is 1874. Nesje is a recent widower with a young son, working as a haymaker on an estate in the town of Molde and steadily clearing his own small holding. Then he meets Serianna—an outsider, looking for work, who takes him fishing and smokes a pipe and is thoroughly unlike anyone he’s met before. Soon the two fall in love and marry, and Nesje begins to dream of a prosperous future. But prosperity is hard to come by. Some Norwegians—including Serianna’s spirited sister, Gjertine—have begun to immigrate to the American West, attracted by the glimmer of land and commerce. One of Nesje’s sons follows, while another moves to the city and becomes a wealthy merchant, and another is adopted by Serianna’s childless brother and sister-in-law. In Norway and in America, however, the turn of the century is approaching: mechanization is superseding skilled labor, the moneyed classes are growing ever more powerful, and sacrifices don’t always deliver what was promised. Haymaker in Heaven is a sprawling saga—drawn from Edvard Hoem’s own family history—and a vivid portrait of two countries at a critical moment of intersection.

River of Eden

Author: Glenna McReynolds
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 055358393X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Sanchez Travers seemed more scoundrel than scientist, but Dr. Annie Parrish needs the help of the Harvard-educated ethnobiologist to head up the Amazon in search of an extraordinary discovery.

Maneki Neko

Author: Susan Lendroth
Publisher: Shen's Books
ISBN: 9781885008923
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Japanese legend of Maneki Neko, the beckoning cat, who is a symbol of good luck and good fortune in many Asian countries. In a small Japanese village, a poor monk and his cat Tama live a simple life at the Kotoku Monastery. One day, a great storm passes through the village, and Tama is caught in the rain outside the temple. She waits under the eaves of a small shrine, cleaning her face and whiskers as best she can with her paw. A noble samurai is also passing through, and stops his horse under the cover of a large tree. But through the rain, what does he see? A cat with a raised paw, beckoning him forward? Curious, the samurai urges his horse forward. Just then, a bolt of lightning flashes and strikes the tree behind him, splitting it in two. The beckoning cat has saved his life. In his gratitude, the samurai brings riches to the small temple and the monk, who shares his wealth with the village. So goes the Japanese legend of Maneki Neko, the beckoning cat. And to this day, the cat with raised paw beckoning guests is a symbol of good luck and good fortune in many Asian countries.