Andrew Pham paints a vivid picture of Vietnam: the food (We wolf down our plebeian meal of catfish, rice, pickled firecracker eggplant with shrimp paste, and steamed string beans from his garden), some not so appetizing native dishes (their chopsticks hovering above plates of boiled gizzards curly like cashews, pig hearts sliced like truffles, intestines chopped up like rigatoni); the people (You can tell a Vietnamese by the way he wears his sandals. Is the stem firmly held between the toes? Or does the ball of the heel drag beyond the sandal? Do the sandals flap like loose tongues when he walks?); the poverty (They walk to the highway and ride a three-wheeled Tuk-tuk to Hanoi four days a week. Rice-girl makes her own rice dumplings and Papaya-girl picks her fruit from the family orchard. Neither has enough merchandise for a stall at the market or makes enough to pay for a permit to sell on the street, so they go door-to-door).
Read MoreThe Duke of Deception
In this memoir, Geoffrey Wolff, writes an unflinchingly honest portrayal of growing up with his father, a man who goes through life duping people into extending him credit in order to bask in a state of temporary luxury, only to have it all come tumbling down like a house of cards, because it’s never enough. Once the bills come due and the repossessions begin, the “Duke” can only haul himself and his family out of town in pursuit of the next target of deception.
Read MoreIn the Shadow of Memory
Imagine being in your early forties, a writer and a poet, a distance runner. Now picture suffering brain damage from a virus that requires every bit of your concentration to walk without falling on your face. Words that once flowed easily from your mind to paper now crawl forward haltingly, scrambled, and often without coherence. You are disabled to the point where you can no longer work in public policy, and communicating is sometimes an exercise in folly because what you mean to say and the words that end up being heard are utterly different. Welcome to the world of Floyd Skloot. His book, In the Shadow of Memory, is a collection of essays that takes readers into his world.
Read More