American Refugee

It all started with a curse. When Woong's hunger drives him to steal the fancy meal set out by his superstitious mother, he invokes a shaman's wrath. Soon afterwards, a flood ravages his home, ripping him from his parents and hurtling him into street life during the catastrophic North Korean famine of the 1990s. Traveling from place to place in order to survive, Woong meets a grandmother whose faith in the Dear Leader enables her to wait patiently for the arrival of food aid, an uncle whose plot to take over a grain silo could land the whole family in prison camp, and a mysterious character who may or may not have an angelic blessing.

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical, and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence.

A groundbreaking revisionist history of the last days of the Vietnam War that reveals the acts of American heroism that saved more than one hundred thousand South Vietnamese from communist revenge In 1973 U.S. participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included...

It's 30,000 BC. Hiding in a giant mimosa tree, Maru watches her father meet with the leader of a treacherous Andean tribe. Her father, furious that she's followed him, tells her that if he is killed - something he fully expects - she must warn their people to flee. The people are prepared, but Maru, at age seven, is not. Her father places heavy responsibility on her because she followed him.