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A great memoirist can burnish even an ordinary childhood into something bright--see, for instance, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. So what about a really good writer with access to a dramatic and little-documented story? This is the case with Catfish and Mandala, Vietnamese American Andrew X. Pham's captivating first book, which delves fearlessly into questions of home, family, and identity. The son of Vietnamese parents who suffered terribly during the Vietnam War and brought their family to America when he was 10, Pham, on the cusp of his 30s, defied his parents' conservative hopes for him and his engineering career by becoming a poorly paid freelance writer. After the suicide of his sister, he set off on an even riskier path to travel some of the world on his bicycle. In the grueling, enlightening year that followed, he pedaled through Mexico, the American West Coast, Japan, and finally his far-off first land, Vietnam.
The story, with some of a mandala's repeated symbolic motifs, works on several levels at once. It is an exploration into the meaning of home, a descriptive travelogue, and an intimate look at the Vietnamese immigrant experience. There are beautifully illuminated flashbacks to the experience of fleeing Vietnam and to an earlier, more innocent childhood. While Pham's stern father, a survivor of Vietcong death camps, regrets that Pham has not been a respectful Vietnamese son, he also reveals that he wishes he himself had been more "American" for his kids, that he had "taken [them] camping." Catfish and Mandala is a book of double-edged truths, and it would make a fascinating study even in less able hands. In those of the adventurous, unsentimental Pham, it is an irresistible story. --Maria Dolan
Book Description
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book PrizeA New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Whiting Writers' AwardA Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the YearCatfish 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.
Customer Reviews:
a random and beautiful encounter.......2007-07-09
i was travelling alone in Lhasa, Tibet and found this book in Makye Ame restaurant. i started reading and couldn't put it down. it gave me true enjoyable solitude on my lonely journey. loved it. i spent the last two days reading it in that restaurant. ordered a copy from Amazon last week and i can't wait to finish it.
my heartfelt thanks to Mr Pham!
. . arriving at the place where you started. . .and knowing it for the first time.......2007-07-09
`I am a mover of betweens' writes Andrew X.Pham. . . `I slip among classifications, like water in cupped palms.' And in his award winning Catfish and Mandala he takes his readers into those `betweens' with him Viet-kieu, `foreign' Vietnamese, Pham sets out from San Francisco on his rickety 18 speed bicycle riding the Pacific Rim, first up the coast to Seattle, then through Japan, and finally arriving in Ho Chi Minh City from where he begins his odyssey through Vietnam, seeking to understand his relationship to the country of his birth, and the people, and his culture.
The ride he takes us on becomes, for the reader, as spiritual as it is physical. We feel every bump in the road, we push up the hills, we are cold, wet, hungry, ambivalent at times, and we suffer from chronic dysentery. Pham meets people who reject him, who taunt him, and those who, often after initial distrust, befriend him for part of the journey. While he is `pedaling and pushing' alone to Hanoi and back , on a journey everyone advises him is too dangerous, the narrative ebbs and flows through his childhood, through the escape on the boat, through the struggles of his family.
Pham moves comfortably from the specific, the particular, like his recollections of Scarface, Bugsy, Redeye, or Bagman and Mechanic, or the roasting ears of corn dripping with pork fat and scallions, to the philosophic - and then the poetic. It is little surprise he has been linked to writers like Thoreau, Kerouac, Steinback.. . I might add William Carlos Williams,T.S.Eliot or Carl Sandburg. He speaks at once of Vietnam and of his uncertain place there and of the US- and in so doing speaks to all of us who now count among the millions who have left homelands and no longer fully understand what home is, and who `move between.'
By the end of Pham's journey we begin to understand what that is, and value it.
moving.......2007-06-09
This story of a family's escape from Vietnam is a captivating memoir. The author combines his family history with richly detailed descriptions of the landscape of Vietnam. Very well-written and moving.
Great book!.......2007-04-30
Born in Vietnam and came to America at the age of 2--this book is such a great read. It's quite a feeling to see so many of my own thoughts and conflicts regarding my heritage written out this way. Highly recommended.
From another Vietnamese's perspective.......2007-02-23
Overall, this book is well written and has its good moments. As a Vietnamese who came to America at the same time frame and age as the writer, I can't help but to dislike the writer as I read the book.
First of all, I think the writer has a condescending view toward Vietnam and the people. He tries too hard to describe the negatives while not trying to even understand the reason for the state of the country and the people. I feel that the writer sensationalizes, even bordeline fictionalize, his story to appease to the readers. In the book, the author tried to describe the character Kim as a victim of the society, yet, he goes on to use her and skip town so he wouldn't have to face her. He paints such a negative picture of everyone that he met on the road. I wonder why he even took this trip. This author is the reason why Vietnamese Americans are so dislike in Vietnam. The author came back to the country without any knowledge nor understanding, and sadly, all he can do is whined.
I'm two years older than the author and came to United States when I was nine. What the author faced is not unlike any other Vietnamese refugees' story. I wonder about some facts and timeline in the author's recollection of his childhood. Base on the events that were stated, the author must have a photographic memory at such a young age. Some of his memories were a bit far fetched. One has to wonder if the memories were really his or a collection of someone else's memories.
As far as the difficulties in a new country, GET OVER IT!!! Every Vietnamese had to endure the similar situations. My father was a high ranking government official and he too had to work as a janitor. My mother who was a teacher, had to work on a assembly line making seat belts. I grew up in Fresno picking oranges and tomatoes. My wife escaped Vietnam by herself at the age of 16. We all survived and thrived on our experiences. There were many, many more Vietnamese who endured much worse fate than Mr. Pham. I find the author's self-indulgent story annoying by the end of the book.
Overall, I think the author tries a bit too hard writing about himself and forget the real victims, his motherland and the Vietnamese people. As much as the author wants to convey of his noble character, I find his views lack of empathy and understanding for Vietnam. I happen to be very proud of my roots and appreciate all that Vietnam has to offered, even with all of its imperfections. Sadly, Mr. Pham reflects many Vietnamese Americans that have turned their back on their roots. I'm proud that I was born in Vietnam and will be proud of my heritage everyday.
Average customer rating:
- nice pictures, bad book design
- Moving subject matter, beautiful photographs
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For Most of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory
Essay Ignatieff , and
Michael Ignatieff
Manufacturer: Dewi Lewis Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Afghanistan Chronotopia
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5x7
ASIN: 1899235663 |
Book Description
Simon Norfolk has photographed sites of genocide and war crimes-names that ring like a death knoll for mankind-Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Dresden, Ukraine, Armenia, Namibia. His photographs are charged with an overwhelming emotional intensity as they document where humans have left their trace. They are an extraordinary record of man's inhumanity to man.
Customer Reviews:
nice pictures, bad book design.......2007-08-01
with a photography book measuring 9x13 inches, one would expect the photographs to take up a healthy percentage of the space on each page. not so with this book. each photo measures under five inches square(infact the page layout is identical to whats on the cover). i suppose the author figured that given the subject matter, each of the photos needed plenty of breathing room. this may be. but in doing so, i feel they have sacrificed the impact and clarity that comes with a larger reproduction.
-as well, the photos do get progressively weaker as the book goes on...
Moving subject matter, beautiful photographs.......2000-08-03
Norfolk is a brilliant photographer who has taken very difficult subject matter and made beautiful images. He photographed in places which have seen terrible events, past and present: Vietnam, Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rawanda, to name only the most recognizable. The photographs are true, just. No heartstring pulling here. Only clear vision and humane expression. The essay by Ignatieff matches the level of the photograhps. I thank and applaud the authors.
Book Description
An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.
Customer Reviews:
Schama does it again.......2007-01-25
Simon Schama writes in a clear, concise and interesting way. As a purely fiction reader I never thought I could plough through factual stuff - in fact I'd tried and failed many times - then i read my first Schama - about the Slave trade - Rough Crossings - and now I'm working my way through his works. If a philistine like me can read, learn and enjoy from them then they must be good.
The world seen on another sphere.......2007-01-04
I love Schama's work ! His approach is always original and this book is proof of his creative mind, once again, at work. I have lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 25 years and I thoroughly appreciate the way Schama has brought me to see the rhyme & reason to the cultural quirks I've come across in all these countries. The umbrella effect in action ! For a younger adult today, studying art, social dynamics, economics or even psychiatry there is food for thought !
450 pages too long.......2005-06-08
The author had a great idea for a book. He collected enough 'meat' for about 30-50 pages and then exploded it into almost 500 pages of boring talk, so typical of many historians.
There are a few gems in this book and those few who manage to persevere through the boredom of the text may find it somewhat rewarding. Had the author written a 50-page book that covers the essence of what he has to offer, this would have been a four or five star book.
Excellent historically-informed philosophy from a great mind.......2003-07-15
Surprisingly, the other reviewers on this site seem to have missed the point of the book. The point is that our perceptions of nature are not merely historically informed, but historically constituted. The irrespressable Lithuanian Bison was the formative metaphor for the Lithuanian pagan cultural ideal of freedom. Ultimately, it's a cultural case for the preservation of wilderness because that wilderness is part of who we are in the deepest sense. Agree or disagree with Schama's thesis, but you should try to comprehend the book before you review it. Personally, I think it's brilliant.
A must read.......2001-10-28
This is one book "to keep besides you" for ever. Each of the esays is so engaging that you are sorry to see it coming to a close. The essay on foutains "water paths" at Casserta and Versailles have changed my view for-ever. I only wish to visit or re-visit the paces mentioned with tis book in hand to really appreciate them with a more cultured view.
Book Description
Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina’s Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gastón R. Gordillo reveals how the Toba’s memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of âthe bushâ that dominates the Chaco landscape.
As Gordillo explains, the bush is the result of social, cultural, and political processes that intertwine this place with other geographies. Labor exploitation, state violence, encroachment by settlers, and the demands of Anglican missionaries all transformed this land. The Toba’s lives have been torn between alienating work in sugar plantations and relative freedom in the bush, between moments of domination and autonomy, abundance and poverty, terror and healing. Part of this contradictory experience is culturally expressed in devils, evil spirits that acquire different features in different places. The devils are sources of death and disease in the plantations, but in the bush they are entities that connect with humans as providers of bush food and healing power. Enacted through memory, the experiences of the Toba have produced a tense and shifting geography. Combining extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, historical research, and critical theory, Gordillo offers a nuanced analysis of the Toba’s social memory and a powerful argument that geographic places are not only objective entities but also the subjective outcome of historical forces.
Customer Reviews:
Like pieces of a puzzle.......2005-01-29
Gordillo's work is an excellent example of how feelings about a place are always constructed ("made, unmade, and remade") in opposition to other places and are a result of the memories of those various places. His descriptions of the Toba landscapes leave the reader with an incredible desire to be sitting under the same trees drinking maté while listening to stories of the cane farms. His argument is well laid out with each chapter being almost like one more piece of the puzzle so that by the end, the reader can almost SEE the argument as though it were a painting. It illuminates aspects of Toba life but goes beyond this by looking at how people in general deal with their memories of places. Anyone who has ever traveled out of their comfort zone and had conflicting memories about the experience needs to read this book. An all around enjoyable and enlightening read.
Book Description
The Columbia River of today bears little resemblance to the river Native peoples and settlers knew in the early twentieth century. Between 1933 and 1984, an unparalleled fervor of engineering transformed much of the river into a series of large reservoirs contained by fourteen hydroelectric dams. While many mourned the loss of the freeflowing river, others embraced a newly tamed waterway that could control floods, irrigate desert lands, and supply electrical power for the growing region.
River of Memory honors a place and time now gone from view. It restores an unfettered Columbia through more than ninety historical photographs that capture the river as it once appeared. This extraordinary visual record is complemented with the words of early explorers, surveyors, and naturalists who wrote about specific places along the river and with new works by contemporary American and Canadian writers and poets.
Organized to carry the reader from the mouth of the Columbia where it enters the ocean to its source in eastern British Columbia, the narrative follows the natural history of the river through the archetypal journey of salmon returning to the river's headwaters in Columbia Lake. Introducing each section are illustrations of salmon and other indigenous fish by artists Joseph Tomelleri and Dan McConnell.
River of Memory encourages readers to linger along the river's shores and spend time reflecting on its dramatic mountain and plateau landscapes. It fosters connections between the river's natural and human histories through the words of the distinguished writers represented throughout, including Jeannette Armstrong, Gloria Bird, Peter Christensen, Tim McNulty, Kathleen Dean Moore, Eileen Pearkes, Theodore Roethke, Kim Stafford, William Stafford, Robert Sund, David Wagoner, Elizabeth Woody, and many more.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful book.......2007-09-13
I gave this book to my Dad as a gift and he loves it, as do I. It's a trip down memory lane with lots of nice historic pictures and descriptive writing. I especially am interested in the Celilo Falls and saddened to see what a treasure was destroyed by dams.
Beautiful.......2006-11-13
The River is a bueaty today but yesterday - WOW! This is a beautiful work on a great river!
Memories from an earlier life of the river........2006-11-02
The Columbia is by no means the biggest, the longest or just any other 'est of the rivers in North America. Well maybe it's the roughest. At the bar where the Columbia enters the Pacific Ocean is quite possibly the consistently roughest water in the country. It's called the 'Graveyard of the Pacific,' having claimed over two thousand ships. That's why the Coast Guard located their small boat school in Astoria, Oregon, just inland from the bar.
Anyway, now the Columbia is tamed to a great extent by a series of dams that regulate the flow of water. No longer are there the hundred-foot waves breaking along the bar. This book, though is composed of pre-dam pictures of the river that remain only as memories.
The book is organized in an interesting manner. Just inside the front is a map of the first 200.5 miles of the river. Along the track of the river are a series of numbers. These reflect the page numbers of the pictures that follow. The first number is 5, and the picture on page 5 shows the bar, along with a note that it's 1,243 miles to the source of the river. The pictures range from the mid 1800's to current.
Further into the book are more maps, more pictures. To the old-timer of the area, here will be a collection of memories. To the rest of us, here is simply a spectacular set of photographs of a place that is no more.
Average customer rating:
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Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory
Manufacturer: University of Tennessee Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
United States
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ASIN: 1572332727 |
Book Description
In the decades following the Civil War, southerners erected hundreds of public sculptures, constructed architectural memorials, and created outdoor ritual spaces as means to express their deeply felt perspectives about the conflict. Built first in mourning and later in a wave of celebratory commemoration that peaked at the turn of the century, the sculptural monuments found across the region record the nostalgic views of Confederate veterans, their descendents, and especially their women. White women often led fund-raising campaigns to build the monuments, which carry inscriptions speaking of courage, duty, states' rights, and "northern aggression." The statues honor the common soldier as well as Confederate leaders such as Lee, Jackson, and Davis.
Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory is a richly illustrated collection of fourteen essays examining the ways in which these memorials—from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain—and the public rituals surrounding them testify to the tenets of the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war. Several essays highlight the creative leading role played by women's groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture—African Americans and Union supporters—wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape.
The authors trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. Thus these essays extend the growing literature on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause by shifting the focus to the realm of the visual. They are especially relevant in the present day when Confederate symbols and monuments continue to play a central role in a public—and often emotionally charged—debate about how the South's past should be remembered.
Book Description
Traditional Chinese painters aimed at capturing the inner essence of the visual form through the rhythmic movement of their brushstroke on silk or paper, attuned to transmit the invisible forces of the universe -- the Tao that pervades the world that we inhabit. These paintings by four Chinese Masters reveal the workings of the Tao through the vitality and expressiveness of their brushstrokes and the harmonious rhythm of composition. Handstitched open-back spines with silky matte laminated paper covers over boards. Lined creamy, archival-quality paper.
Customer Reviews:
PERFECT SIZE, BINDING, TONES .......2006-09-12
I am so excited it is at Amazon!
Now that I see all the others I wonder if I should stay with this and buy more and have a congruent shelf? If I have many exciting "flavors" next to each other it make attract unwelcome attention.
Great brand and the hand stitching mat be the thing to look for.
Handstitched Tao Landscape Lined Journal.......2006-08-28
This journal is well made and beautiful to look at. The lining is well spaced. It is an item I am proud to keep on my bedside table.
Beautiful Book!.......2004-07-21
It's sometimes difficult to know until you hold a journal in your hands if its quality is worthy of your thoughts. Curious about this series of blank books, I located one in a Border's store so I could examine it closely, and was sold (though I actually bought several of various styles through Amazon due to the greatly reduced price and wide selection).
Just wanted to reassure any curious journal-keepers that this is a very nice book for having paper binding. The surfaces of the front and back plates are silky smooth, taut and very pretty. The spine, being sewn with strings, is tight, yet allows the book to lay completely flat when open. The pages inside are very smooth, practically non-porous grain, and of a medium weight, thick enough for fine-tip pen-and-ink, but too thin for any other medium of drawing or writing element. I'm usually a fan of leather-bound journals because they're sturdier and more aesthetically pleasing to me, but as paper-bound journals go, these are among the nicest I've seen.
Very Pretty Book..........2004-07-21
It's sometimes difficult to know until you hold a journal in your hands if its quality is worthy of your thoughts. Curious about this series of blank books, I located one in a Border's store so I could examine it closely, and was sold (though I actually bought several of various styles through Amazon due to the greatly reduced price and wide selection).
Just wanted to reassure any curious journal-keepers that this is a very nice book for having paper binding. The surfaces of the front and back plates are silky smooth, taut and very pretty. The spine, being sewn with strings, is tight, yet allows the book to lay completely flat when open. The pages inside are very smooth, practically non-porous grain, and of a medium weight, thick enough for fine-tip pen-and-ink, but too thin for any other medium of drawing or writing element. I'm usually a fan of leather-bound journals because they're sturdier and more aesthetically pleasing to me, but as paper-bound journals go, these are among the nicest I've seen.
I'm exceptionally pleased.......2003-02-10
This is the first journal I've gotten from this series so I wasn't too sure what I was getting. But I'm delighted with the book. It's slightly larger than the usual journals. Although it doesn't double back on itself like spiral-bound books, the hand-stitching does allow you to open it up wider than regular hardbacks, so you don't have to crimp your handwriting as you near the crease.
Average customer rating:
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Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories (W.B. Stanford Memorial Lectures)
Susan E. Alcock
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Archaeologies of Memory
ASIN: 0521890004 |
Book Description
Social or collective memory has recently become a much debated subject in academic disciplines and in the popular media. People in antiquity surely possessed similar shared memories, but except for the limited accounts of elite authors--they are notoriously difficult to recover. This book explores how material culture, in particular the evidence of landscape and of monuments, can reveal commemorative practices and collective amnesias in past societies. Three case studies are considered--Greece in the early Roman period, Hellenistic and Roman Crete, and Messenia from Archaic to Hellenistic times.
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