Andrew Lam

AUTHOR OF THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD WINNER, PERFUME DREAMS: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIETNAMESE DIASPORA • AUTHOR OF BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST, the widely taught and anthologized debut short story collection • Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America. “Universal and personal.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior • “Will be read and studied for years to come.”—Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi • “Maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora.”—Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface • “Lam’s most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet.”—Matthew Spangler, playwright • “For anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home."—Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life • “Taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees.”—Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.

Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies - the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth. It is a tale replete with dramatic episodes as spellbinding as any blockbuster Hollywood movie. In The Masters of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Lam, an award-winning author and retinal surgeon, distills the long arc of medical progress down to the crucial moments that were responsible for the world’s greatest medical miracles. He brings to life heroic tales of embattled mavericks who endured ridicule and sometimes risked their own lives to conceive the incredible, life-saving cures we depend on, and often take for granted, today. Readers will discover fascinating true stories throughout history, including: Rival surgeons who killed patient after patient in their race to operate on beating hearts - and put us on the path toward the life-saving heart transplant, A quartet of Canadians who miraculously discovered insulin in a saga marred by jealousy and resentment, The discovery of penicillin, and the long-suffering doctors who gave it to the world but were robbed of the credit, The feud between two Americans in the quest for the polio vaccine, a contest that persisted long after both died and continues today, The discredited New York surgeon whose “heretical” idea to cure patients by deliberately infecting them has now inspired our next best hope to defeat cancer, The Hungarian doctor who solved the greatest mystery of maternal deaths in childbirth, only to be ostracized for his discovery. The Masters of Medicine is a fascinating chronicle of human courage, audacity, error, and luck. This riveting ode to mankind expertly highlights the battle against deaths from heart attacks, diabetes, infection, cancer, trauma, and childbirth, revealing why the past is prelude to the game-changing breakthroughs of tomorrow.

Sometimes the line that separates coward from hero is not easy to spot. When that line is crossed, to what lengths will a remorseful man go to set things right? That's a question that had never crossed Daniel Tokunaga's mind until the U. S. government started calling, wanting to know more about his father's service with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II. Something happened while his father was fighting the Germans in France, and no one is sure exactly what. At least, no one who's still alive and willing to give details. Wanting answers, Daniel upends his life to find out what occurred on a small, obscure hilltop half a world away, in a quest for the truth that threatens his marriage, his sanity, and the love of everyone he holds dear. In unraveling his family's catastrophic past, the only thing for certain is that nothing--his life, career, and family--can ever be the same again.

In Saving Sight, Dr. Andrew Lam explains the intricacies of human sight and shines a light on the heroes who fought to save it, while also revealing the personal side of life as an eye surgeon - the stress and joy of a man who, on his best days, can turn darkness into light. Many remarkable life stories illuminate this autobiographical/biographical/historical work. Included are Louis Braille, Judah Folkman, Harold Ridley and many others who have enabled us to see in all kinds of unimaginable ways.

*Finalist for the California Book Award* The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

A noted journalist and NPR commentator presents a collection of essays that reflect his life-long struggle for identity as a Vietnamese national living abroad and what the Vietnam War means to Vietnamese people living in exile as they long for a homeland that no longer exists for them. Original.