It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. "The Sympathizer" is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, "The Sympathizer" explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

The Sympathizer

Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler's beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

First published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, "The Quiet American" remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Robert Stone.

The Quiet American

Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck--by the controversial and influential Vietnamese writer Vu Trong Phung--is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan's fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel.

Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel's clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization.

Vu Trong Phung died in Hanoi, in 1939 at the age of twenty-seven. He is the author of at least eight novels, seven plays, and several other works of fiction in addition to Dumb Luck.

Peter Zinoman is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History, University of California, Berkeley. Nguyen Nguyet Cam is Vietnamese Language Instructor, University of California, Berkeley.

Dumb Luck

" Paradise of the Blind" is an exquisite portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, we come to know the tragedy of her family as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh‘s political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother‘s appalling self–sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity –– and a future.

Paradise of the Blind

It is said that in war heaven and earth change places not once, but many times. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is the haunting memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down.

The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in Ky La, her tiny village in central Vietnam. As the government and Viet Cong troops fought in and around Ky La, both sides recruited children as spies and saboteurs. Le Ly was one of those children. Before the age of sixteen, Le Ly had suffered near-starvation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and the deaths of beloved family members—but miraculously held fast to her faith in humanity. And almost twenty years after her escape to America, she was drawn inexorably back to the devastated country and family she left behind. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, offering a poignant picture of Vietnam, then and now, and of a courageous woman who experienced the true horror of the Vietnam War—and survived to tell her unforgettable story.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

In 1979, Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato"—a novel about the Vietnam War—won the National Book Award. In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

The Things They Carried

Since its publication in the early nineteenth century, this long narrative poem has stood unchallenged as the supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. Thông’s new and absorbingly readable translation (on pages facing the Vietnamese text) is illuminated by notes that give comparative passages from the Chinese novel on which the poem was based, details on Chinese allusions, and literal translations with background information explaining Vietnamese proverbs and folk sayings.

 

The Tale of Kiều

"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.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

An epic tale of love, loyalty, and war from the acclaimed author of "Monkey Bridge"
  
 Half a century after it began, the Vietnam War still has a hold on our national psyche. Lan Cao’s now-classic debut, "Monkey Bridge", won her wide renown for “connecting... the opposite realities of Vietnam and America” (Isabel Allende). In her triumphant new novel, Cao transports readers back to the war, illuminating events central to twentieth-century history through the lives of one Vietnamese American family.
  
 Minh is a former South Vietnamese commander of the airborne brigade who left his homeland with his daughter, Mai. During the war, their lives became entwined with those of two Americans: James, a soldier, and Cliff, a military adviser. Forty years later, Minh and his daughter Mai live in a close-knit Vietnamese immigrant community in suburban Virginia. As Mai discovers a series of devastating truths about what really happened to her family during those years, Minh reflects upon his life and the story of love and betrayal that has remained locked in his heart since the fall of Saigon.

The Lotus and the Storm

Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in English a wide range of stories from the most important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. The characters range from a party official who turns into a goat while watching porno movies, to an Indian who carries his mother's bones in his knapsack, to a war widow trying desperately to piece together her life through the fragments of debris she collects from her back yard. The title novella "Behind the Red Mist" is a Vietnamese "Back To the Future", a social satire in which a young man in the Hanoi of the eighties receives an electric shock and is transported back to his same apartment block in 1967 wartime Vietnam during the American bombing. He not only witnesses the war with the eyes of someone who knows its outcome, but participates in his parents' courtship and discovers some truths about the generation held up to his own as a role model.

Behind the Red Mist: Short Fiction by Ho Anh Thai

"Reminiscent of "All Quiet on Western Front" and "The Red Badge of Courage". . . . A breathtakingly original work."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

Twenty-eight-year-old Quan has been fighting for the Communist cause in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging scraps of food to feed himself and his men. Quan seeks comfort in childhood memories as he tries to sort out his conflicting feelings of patriotism and disillusionment. Then, given the chance to return to his home, Quan undertakes a physical and mental journey that brings him face to face with figures from his past--his angry father, his childhood sweetheart, his boyhood friends now maimed or dead--and ultimately to the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably lost in the wake of the war. In a voice both lyrical and stark, Duong Thu Huong, one of Vietnam's most beloved writers, powerfully conveys the conflict that spiritually destroyed her generation.

"If it is a crime to take an unflinching look at the reality of war and life under a totalitarian regime, and to do it with great art and mastery, then Duong Thu Huong, is gloriously guilty."--"The New York Times Book Review"

Novel Without a Name

This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country. 

In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.

The Gangster We Are All Looking For

In 1968 Nguyen Qui Duc was nine years old, his father was a high-ranking civil servant in the South Vietnamese government, and his mother was a school principal. Then the Viet Cong launched their Tet offensive, and the Nguyen family’s comfortable life was destroyed. The author’s father was taken prisoner and marched up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam's highest-ranking civilian prisoner, he eventually spent twelve years in captivity, composing poems in his head to maintain his sanity. Nguyen himself escaped from Saigon as North Vietnamese tanks approached in 1975. He came of age as an American teenager, going to school dances and working at a Roy Rogers restaurant, yet yearning for the homeland and parents he had to leave behind. The author’s mother stayed in Vietnam to look after her mentally ill daughter. She endured poverty and “reeducation” until her husband was freed and the Nguyens could reunite. Intertwining these three stories, "Where the Ashes Are" shows us the Vietnam War through a child’s eyes, privation after a Communist takeover, and the struggle of new immigrants. The author, who returned to Vietnam as an American reporter, provides a detailed portrait of the nation as it opened to the West in the early 1990s. "Where the Ashes Are" closes with Nguyen’s thoughts on being pulled between his adopted country and his homeland.

Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

The time has come to take the fight to the Lankies.

Mars has been under Lanky control for more than a year. Since then, the depleted forces of Earth's alliances have rebuilt their fleets, staffing old warships with freshly trained troops. Torn between the need to beat the Lankies to the punch and taking enough time to put together an effective fighting force, command has decided to strike now.

Once again, seasoned veterans Andrew and Halley find themselves in charge of green troops and at the sharp tip of the spear as the combined military might of Earth goes up against the Lankies. But if there's one constant in war, it's that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy...and the Lankies want to hold on to Mars as badly as humanity wants to reclaim it.

Fields of Fire (Frontlines, #5)

Binh, a Vietnamese cook, flees Saigon in 1929, disgracing his family to serve as a galley hand at sea. The taunts of his now-deceased father ringing in his ears, Binh answers an ad for a live-in cook at a Parisian household, and soon finds himself employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Toklas and Stein hold court in their literary salon, for which the devoted yet acerbic Binh serves as chef, and as a keen observer of his "Mesdames" and their distinguished guests. But when the enigmatic literary ladies decide to journey back to America, Binh is faced with a monumental choice: will he, the self-imposed "exile," accompany them to yet another new country, return to his native Vietnam, or make Paris his home?

The Book of Salt

Cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay has edited a collection of essays that explore what it means to live in a world where women are frequently belittled and harassed due to their gender, and offers a call to arms insisting that "not that bad" must no longer be good enough.

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Like navigating a monkey bridge? A bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries? The narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge her mother's tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the "luminous motion," as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future. "With incredible lightness, balance and elegance," writes Isabel Allende, "ALan Cao crosses? over an abyss of pain, loss, separation and exile, connecting on one level the opposite realities of Vietnam and North America, and on a deeper level the realities of the material world and the world of the spirits."

Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and New Voices Award nominee


A "Philadelphia Inquirer" Best of the Rest of Summer 1997 pick


A Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award Book Prize nominee


Monkey Bridge

U nastavku uspješnica New York Timesa, fantasy romana za mlade Žar u pepelu, autorica Sabaa Tahir prati svoje junake – Laiju, robinju Učenjačkog Carstva, i Eliasa, najboljeg vojnika Carstva. Kao i u prethodnom romanu, radnja je smještena u fantastični svijet nadahnut Rimskim Carstvom.

Laia i Elias pokušavaju doći do zloglasnog zatvora Kauf kako bi oslobodili Laijina brata u čijim bi rukama mogla biti sudbina Učenjaka. Kao da se sve udružilo protiv Laije i Eliasa – progone ih Bojovnici, zapovjednica i vlastita prošlost. Na svojem putu moraju nadmudriti neprijatelje, ali i suočiti se s prevrtljivošću vlastita srca. Moraju se suočiti i s Helenom Aquillom, Eliasovom prijateljicom iz djetinjstva koja postaje krvosljednica Carstva i želi ih ubiti.

Ovaj je roman još mračniji i dojmljiviji od prethodnoga, a Sabaa Tahir ne preza ni od opisa umova zločinaca. Pričom prepunom akcije, obrata i snažnih emocija Baklja u noći jednostavno će vas opčiniti. 

Na prvome mjestu ljestvice uspješnica New York Timesa.
Uspješnica na popisu USA Todaya.
Uspješnica na popisu Wall Street Journala.

A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)

The 40th-anniversary edition of the classic Vietnam memoir—featured in the PBS documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick—with a new foreword by Kevin Powers.

In March of 1965, Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed at Danang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history’s ugliest wars, he returned home—physically whole but emotionally wasted, his youthful idealism forever gone.

A Rumor of War is far more than one soldier’s story. Upon its publication in 1977, it shattered America’s indifference to the fate of the men sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. In the years since then, it has become not only a basic text on the Vietnam War but also a renowned classic in the literature of wars throughout history and, as the author writes, of "the things men do in war and the things war does to them."

"Heartbreaking, terrifying, and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

A Rumor of War

A big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran.

Intense, powerful, and compelling, "Matterhorn" is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" and James Jones's "The Thin Red Line". It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, "Matterhorn" is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.

A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. This is his first novel. He lives in rural Washington State.

Matterhorn

Special Agent John Puller, combat veteran and the army's most tenacious investigator, is back in this action-packed thriller from worldwide #1 bestselling author David Baldacci. 
 Two men. Thirty years.John Puller's mother, Jackie, vanished thirty years ago from Fort Monroe, Virginia, when Puller was just a boy. Paul Rogers has been in prison for ten years. But twenty years before that, he was at Fort Monroe. One night three decades ago, Puller's and Rogers' worlds collided with devastating results, and the truth has been buried ever since.Until now.Military investigators, armed with a letter from a friend of Jackie's, arrive in the hospital room of Puller's father--a legendary three-star now sinking into dementia--and reveal that Puller Sr. has been accused of murdering Jackie.Aided by his brother Robert Puller, an Air Force major, and Veronica Knox, who works for a shadowy U.S. intelligence organization, Puller begins a journey that will take him into his own past, to find the truth about his mother.Paul Rogers' time is running out. With the clock ticking, he begins his own journey, one that will take him across the country to the place where all his troubles began: a mysterious building on the grounds of Fort Monroe. There, thirty years ago, the man Rogers had once been vanished too, and was replaced with a monster. And now the monster wants revenge. And the only person standing in his way is John Puller.

No Man's Land (John Puller, #4)

Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, "Going After Cacciato" captures the peculiar mixture of horror and hallucination that marked this strangest of wars.

In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, "Going After Cacciato" stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it's about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

Going After Cacciato

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.
--khaledhosseini.com

The Kite Runner

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

A superb new graphic memoir in which an inspired artist/storyteller reveals the road that brought his family to where they are today: Vietnamerica
  
 GB Tran is a young Vietnamese American artist who grew up distant from (and largely indifferent to) his family’s history. Born and raised in South Carolina as a son of immigrants, he knew that his parents had fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. But even as they struggled to adapt to life in America, they preferred to forget the past—and to focus on their children’s future. It was only in his late twenties that GB began to learn their extraordinary story. When his last surviving grandparents die within months of each other, GB visits Vietnam for the first time and begins to learn the tragic history of his family, and of the homeland they left behind. 

In this family saga played out in the shadow of history, GB uncovers the root of his father’s remoteness and why his mother had remained in an often fractious marriage; why his grandfather had abandoned his own family to fight for the Viet Cong; why his grandmother had had an affair with a French soldier. GB learns that his parents had taken harrowing flight from Saigon during the final hours of the war not because they thought America was better but because they were afraid of what would happen if they stayed. They entered America—a foreign land they couldn’t even imagine—where family connections dissolved and shared history was lost within a span of a single generation.

In telling his family’s story, GB finds his own place in this saga of hardship and heroism. "Vietnamerica" is a visually stunning portrait of survival, escape, and reinvention—and of the gift of the American immigrants’ dream, passed on to their children. "Vietnamerica" is an unforgettable story of family revelation and reconnection—and a new graphic-memoir classic.

Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness, a powerful mercenary whose reign of terror stretches across the Mirabel Galaxy. To those aboard her glass starship, "Marauder", however, she's just Andi, their friend and fearless leader.

But when a routine mission goes awry, the "Marauder"'s all-girl crew is tested as they find themselves in a treacherous situation and at the mercy of a sadistic bounty hunter from Andi's past.

Meanwhile, across the galaxy, a ruthless ruler waits in the shadows of the planet Xen Ptera, biding her time to exact revenge for the destruction of her people. The pieces of her deadly plan are about to fall into place, unleashing a plot that will tear Mirabel in two.

Andi and her crew embark on a dangerous, soul-testing journey that could restore order to their ship or just as easily start a war that will devour worlds. As the "Marauder" hurtles toward the unknown, and Mirabel hangs in the balance, the only certainty is that in a galaxy run on lies and illusion, no one can be trusted.

Zenith (The Androma Saga, #1)

A CLASSIC FROM THE "NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF "ONE SUMMER "

Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller "A Walk in the Woods". "In A Sunburned Country" is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiousity.

Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path. Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide.

In a Sunburned Country

Vietnam, 1968. A nightmarish landscape blackened by napalm and littered with once-human debris. Where victories are measured in mountains of corpses and ordinary men are transformed into obsessive executioners. This is the brutally honest story of Cpl. Joker and his battle-hardened company, survivors of months of unimaginable horror--the crazy-tough and phony-brave, religiously counting the days until their release from the green prison of combat. But they all know one unspoken truth--that even though they're on their way out, their last few hours in Nam could become their last hours on earth.

"The Short-Timers" is a semi-autobiographical novel by former U.S. Marine Gustav Hasford about his experiences in the Vietnam War. Along with Michael Herr and Stanley Kubrick, Hasford later adapted the novel for the film "Full Metal Jacket".

The Short-Timers

For readers of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit" and "Unbroken", the dramatic story of the American rowing team that stunned the world at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics.Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.The emotional heart of the story lies with one rower, Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not for glory, but to regain his shattered self-regard and to find a place he can call home. The crew is assembled by an enigmatic coach and mentored by a visionary, eccentric British boat builder, but it is their trust in each other that makes them a victorious team. They remind the country of what can be done when everyone quite literally pulls together—a perfect melding of commitment, determination, and optimism.Drawing on the boys' own diaries and journals, their photos and memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, "The Boys in the Boat" is an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate story of nine working-class boys from the American west who, in the depths of the Great Depression, showed the world what true grit really meant. It will appeal to readers of Erik Larson, Timothy Egan, James Bradley, and David Halberstam's "The Amateurs".

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and the price of survival was dangerously high.

Dog Soldiers

The eyes of the West have recently been trained on China and India, but Vietnam is rising fast among its Asian peers. A breathtaking period of social change has seen foreign investment bringing capitalism flooding into its nominally communist society, booming cities swallowing up smaller villages, and the lure of modern living tugging at the traditional networks of family and community. Yet beneath these sweeping developments lurks an authoritarian political system that complicates the nation’s apparent renaissance. In this engaging work, experienced journalist Bill Hayton looks at the costs of change in Vietnam and questions whether this rising Asian power is really heading toward capitalism and democracy.

Based on vivid eyewitness accounts and pertinent case studies, Hayton’s book addresses a broad variety of issues in today’s Vietnam, including important shifts in international relations, the growth of civil society, economic developments and challenges, and the nation’s nascent democracy movement as well as its notorious internal security. His analysis of Vietnam’s “police state,” and its systematic mechanisms of social control, coercion, and surveillance, is fresh and particularly imperative when viewed alongside his portraits of urban and street life, cultural legacies, religion, the media, and the arts. With a firm sense of historical and cultural context, Hayton examines how these issues have emerged and where they will lead Vietnam in the next stage of its development.

Vietnam: Rising Dragon

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnam embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called "Commies." The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem's personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco's family, as his mother struggles to grapple with bipolar disorder.

Visually powerful and emotionally potent, "Such a Lovely Little War "is both a large-scale and intimate study of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese: a turbulent national history interwined with an equally traumatic familial one.

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63

The hottest and most controversial book of the year! Find out who really controls the media in America.

“[Ann Coulter] is never in doubt. And that, along with her bright writing, sense of irony and outrage, and her relish at finally hitting back at political opponents (especially in the media) is what makes Slander such refreshing and provocative reading.”
—"Los Angeles Times
"
“[Ann Coulter] is a fluent polemicist with a gift for Menckenesque invective . . . and she can harness such language to subtle, syllogistic argument.”
—"Washington Post Book World"

“The most popular nonfiction book in America.”—"New York Times"

“The real value of Slander . . . is not in the jokes or devastating exposés of liberal politicians and their allies, but the serious and scholarly study of just how entrenched the media prejudice is against anyone whose politics are even faintly conservative.”
—"New York Sun"

“Written with a great deal of passion . . . the real source of its strength—and its usefulness—was its painstaking marshalling of evidence . . . More important than [High Crimes and Misdemeanors] because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of lasting significance.”—"National Review"

Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

Memories of a Pure Spring is a mesmerizing portrait of modern Vietnam and its people who struggle to survive under the complexities of a post-war regime. During the Vietnam war, Hung, a well-known composer, becomes enchanted by the voice and beauty of a young peasant girl named Suong. He invites her to join his troupe; she becomes his wife and his star performer. But after the war, Hung loses his job, setting off a series of events that drive him and Suong into a destructive spiral. One of Vietnam's most popular writers, Duong Thu Huong draws on her own experiences to describe life at the battlefront, the conditions of a "re-education" camp, and the texture and rhythm, scents and sounds, of a provincial Vietnamese city. Most of all, she tells a haunting, universal story of failed love.

Memories of a Pure Spring

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed—but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, "Paco's Story"—winner of a National Book Award—plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.

Paco's Story

The Plagiarising Prophet: Comparing the Parallels between Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and Ellen White's Story of Redemption (1947) (Exposing the False Prophet - Ellen White)

 From bestselling author Kandi Steiner comes a fresh and captivating billionaire romance about a reserved photographer and the powerful CEO who has to have her...

My boyfriend’s billionaire boss always gets what he wants.⁣
⁣
Menacingly handsome and unquestionably powerful, Theo Whitman need only snap his fingers to have a flock of supermodels fall at his feet. So when his steel gray eyes first meet mine, I expect him to pass right over me, to not give so much as a second thought to my presence.⁣
⁣
Instead, he sees me. ⁣
Truly sees me. ⁣
And for a girl who prefers to hide behind her camera lens, it’s the most unnerving experience of my life.⁣
⁣
Until he asks me to stay on his yacht for the summer.⁣
⁣
All I have to do to earn my keep is be Theo’s on-call photographer when he has guests, and I’ll get a free ride through the Mediterranean with my boyfriend. Easy peasy.⁣
⁣
Still, my skin prickles in warning when I say yes.⁣
⁣
As the humid days fade into balmy nights, I can’t seem to avoid Theo. And when he finds me, it’s like a rabbit running into a wolf.⁣
⁣
His intense gaze immobilizes me. The way he speaks strips me bare. Every brush of his skin sears me like a violent flame.⁣
⁣
My boyfriend’s billionaire boss always gets what he wants.⁣
⁣
And this time, I think he wants me.

Vietnam

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

Dumb Luck

Vũ Trọng Phụng

Paradise of the Blind

Dương Thu Hương

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

Le Ly Hayslip

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

The Tale of Kiều

Nguyễn Du

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

Andrew X. Pham

The Lotus and the Storm

Lan Cao

Behind the Red Mist: Short Fiction by Ho Anh Thai

Hồ Anh Thái

Novel Without a Name

Dương Thu Hương

The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Lê Thi Diem Thúy

Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

Nguyen Qui Duc

Fields of Fire (Frontlines, #5)

Marko Kloos

The Book of Salt

Monique Truong

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

Roxane Gay

Monkey Bridge

Lan Cao

A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)

Sabaa Tahir

A Rumor of War

Philip Caputo

Matterhorn

Karl Marlantes

No Man's Land (John Puller, #4)

David Baldacci

Going After Cacciato

Tim O'Brien

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Ocean Vuong

Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

G.B. Tran

Zenith (The Androma Saga, #1)

Sasha Alsberg

In a Sunburned Country

Bill Bryson

The Short-Timers

Gustav Hasford

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown

Dog Soldiers

Robert Stone

Vietnam: Rising Dragon

Bill Hayton

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63

Marcelino Truong

Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

Ann Coulter

Memories of a Pure Spring

Dương Thu Hương

Paco's Story

Larry Heinemann

The Plagiarising Prophet: Comparing the Parallels between Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and Ellen White's Story of Redemption (1947) (Exposing the False Prophet - Ellen White)

Chris Bird

Close Quarters

Kandi Steiner