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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.
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There are some preconceptions about southern traditions that need to be clarified Moonshining is no longer the pastime of grizzled Deliverance yahoos, but a multimillion-dollar business laced with SWAT-style raids; squirrel brains probably aren't responsible for neurological disorders; and in Louisiana, a good cockfight is fun for the whole family. These are some of the enlightened reports delivered by Burkhard Bilger as he explores the stereotypical, eclectic habits of southerners from West Virginia to Oklahoma. Despite Bilger's journalistic pedigree (he is an editor with The Sciences and Discover, and has credits in The Atlantic and Harper's, where his cockfighting piece, "Enter the Chicken" previously appeared), he slips into nostalgia just enough to romanticize a squirrel hunt, or raise a game of backwoods marbles into an Olympic march of glory.

Bilger kicks off the tour from his hometown in Oklahoma, where he "noodles"--thrashes a limb around in catfish-thick waters--hoping to land a fabled 80-pound monster with his bare hands. In Louisiana he challenges the misgivings any nonenthusiast might have about cockfighting. Even though it's illegal in most of the country, the bloodsport is thriving in the Bayou State, replete with trade magazines, well-produced venues, and American Kennel Club-worthy breeding strategies. The same passion for efficiency goes into the moonshining business, where Bilger is taken under the wing of one of the few shiners willing to lead him through his sourmash operation. A few nights later, however, Bilger is on the other side, on a raid with the local sheriff. Squirrel-brain consumption is still popular in hamlets throughout Kentucky, even after a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine blamed a neurological disease on the dish. Frog legs, one Georgia entrepreneur claims, will soon replace chicken, and southern cooking--the kind that features chitlins, pigs feet, and collards--has become haute cuisine in Atlanta. Back in Oklahoma, Bilger connects with a coonhound trainer during a long night's raccoon chase, and he follows the success of a backwoods marble team who shaped their shooters in the granite-strewn streams of Tennessee. Bilger treats each eccentric character with a distant respect and hints at the melancholy of losing tradition, no matter how bizarre. --Lolly Merrell.
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When Larry Brown died suddenly in 2004 at 53, he left a nearly finished sixth novel, A Miracle of Catfish, that revisits several of his favorite themes: fatherhood, alienation, and loneliness Shannon Ravenel, Brown's Algonquin editor, had the daunting task of trimming the enormous manuscript to manageable size, almost impossible for a responsible editor to do without the help of the author. Brown's prolix, rambling style is at times mesmerizing and at times--just rambling. Brown's notes at the end show us where the story might have gone, but it does not suffer for being unfinished. Larry Brown definitely knew where he was taking his reader, and Ravenel helped him along.

Consideration of the fatherhood theme centers around a man known only as "Jimmy's Daddy," an unregenerate, wretched human being and an ignorant, violent drunkard. His preoccupations, view of women, and treatment of Jimmy might be seen as caricatures if we didn't know that such people actually exist. Another father, with a much more interesting story, is Cortez Sharp, a farmer in the low hills near Oxford, Mississippi, for nearly fifty years. He has a daughter, Lucinda, living "with a retard" in Atlanta. The man is a layabout artist who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, which makes Cortez think that he is simply retarded. Cortez has a deep, dark, guilty secret which is eventually revealed, but the two things that we know about him from the beginning are that he is terribly lonely and is stocking a pond he just had dug with catfish--thousands of catfish. Two minor players are Cleve, a muderous black man who is an occasional employee of Cortez's and Tommy, who delivers fish to stock Cortez's pond and owns Ursula, the Mother of all Catfish. Jimmy is the hapless nine-year-old who suffers at the hands of his daddy, and comes to the attention of Cortez who tells him--initially--to get off his property. All of these lives intersect in unexpected ways and are changed by the encounters. Brown writes hell-bent-for-leather in a style uniquely his own which carries the reader along, into landscapes interior and exterior. --Valerie Ryan.
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Former firefighter Earl W. Emerson writes two very interesting mystery series: one about small-town Washington State fire chief Mac Fontana and another about Seattle private investigator Thomas Black. All of Emerson's stories are haunted by ghosts from his characters' pasts, and none more so than this latest, where Emerson sends Black on a long, tangled, and not always obvious search through the roots of the African American family of his former police partner, Luther Little. Little's daughter has disappeared, leaving behind a car full of bullet holes, a dead young white man, and nine birth certificates that raise lots of troubling questions about fraud and parental responsibility. As Black grapples with ancient crimes and current human failure, his sharp and sexy lawyer wife, Kathy Birchfield, is--as always--on hand to keep him focussed. Other Thomas Black books in paperback: Deception Pass, The Million-Dollar Tattoo, Nervous Laughter. --Dick Adler.
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This is a folktale for children In the depths of the waters of a backwoods pond lived a large fish known as Cat, and he was a legend ... no one could catch him, although many tried. Not far away lived a big Maine Coon Cat named Fish, and his dream was to do what seemed impossible ... catch Cat. Their meeting and battle was something that both knew would eventually happen, but the end is something that neither could imagine. Here in the land of dragonflies and red-winged blackbirds, both "Fish" and "Cat" are counseled by the wise sage of the woods, She-Crow. The bedrock principle of this tale is learning the right thing to do; and then doing the right thing. The cat learns this lesson well in his ultimate battle with the catfish. It is a story of perseverance against tough odds, never giving up, and learning to change and grow with the experiences of life..
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