2008 Autobiography Finalist The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars, by Andrew X. Pham

by Rigoberto González | Feb-27-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Rigoberto González discusses Andrew X. Pham’s The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars (Harmony Books)

Following the success of his award-winning memoir Catfish and Mandala, Andrew X. Pham returns once again in The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars to the source of his inspiration and heartbreak—his beloved war-torn homeland—to tell the story of Vietnam through another man’s eyes and memory. The life and times of Thong Van Pham are the life and times of Vietnam; the journeys of the personal and the political intertwine to offer the reader a stunning portrait of a country and its everyday citizens that moves beyond the sensationalistic headlines and the passionless summaries in the history books. The result is neither memoir nor biography but a dramatized eye-opening account of a nation contending with the French occupation, the Japanese invasion, and the controversial “conflict” with the United States.

Thong Van Pham’s narrative unfolds without cynicism or agenda, but with great respect for the human pulse that perseveres despite the devastating damage of war. The individual will to survive, the reader learns, can match any imperialistic deed.

At once startling and poetic, layered with facts, anecdotes and snapshots of recollection that border on the imagined, Andrew X. Pham gives voice to an extraordinary experience, preserving the dignity and authority of the man who lived to tell this tale—his own father.