The Eaves of Heaven

The Eaves of Heaven PDF Author: Andrew X. Pham
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307381218
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World One of the Los Angeles Times’ Favorite Books of the Year One of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, Portland Oregonian A 2009 Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association “Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the ­foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. . . . Now we can add Andrew Pham’s Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books.” —New York Times Book Review “Searing . . . vivid–and harrowing . . . Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman.” —Seattle Times Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the 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. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.

Catfish and Mandala

Catfish and Mandala PDF 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

The Cave PDF 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 Sword of Heaven

The Sword of Heaven PDF 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

River of Stars PDF 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.

River of Time

River of Time PDF Author: Jon Swain
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407072803
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

Dispatches

Dispatches PDF 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.

Singing Out Loud

Singing Out Loud PDF Author: Marilee Eaves
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631526677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Born during World War II, Marilee Eaves has long struggled to fit into the New Orleans elite—secret Mardi Gras societies that ruled the city—into which she was born. Then, as a student at Wellesley, she’s hospitalized at McLean psychiatric hospital, where she begins to realize how much of herself she’s sacrificed to blend into and be fully accepted by the exclusive and exclusionary white Uptown New Orleans culture to which she supposedly belongs. In Singing Out Loud, Eaves tells of her journey to stand on her own two feet—to find a way to be grounded and evolved in the midst of that culture. Along the way, she wrestles with bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and the effects of her bad (heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious) choices. Raw and funny, this book offers hope and encouragement to those willing to be vulnerable, address their issues, and laugh at themself in order to embrace who they truly are.

Rats Saw God

Rats Saw God PDF Author: Rob Thomas
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439115362
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
Steve details his descent from bright star to burnout in this newly repackaged edition of the definitive, highly acclaimed novel from the creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down. Houston, sophomore year: Steve is on top of the world. He and his friends are the talk of the school. He’s in love with a terrific girl. He can even deal with “the astronaut”—a world-famous hero who happens to be his father. San Diego, senior year: Steve is bummed out, drugged out, flunking out. A no-nonsense counselor says he can graduate if he writes a 100-page paper. So Steve starts writing, and as the paper becomes more and more personal, he reveals how a National Merit Scholar has become an under-achieving stoner. And in telling how he got to where he is, Steve discovers how to get to where he wants to be.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go PDF Author: Nancy Guthrie
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433516187
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
A collection of writings from classical and contemporary theologians and Bible teachers encouraging believers to face death with a firm and confident belief in the character and promises of God.
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