Family of Fallen Leaves

Sad isn't even the half of it, when it comes to these lovingly crafted, expertly translated, exquisite stories of pain, loss and heartache. When you read Family of Fallen Leaves, you feel it in the pit of your stomach - no small achievement for any type of literature, much less fiction translated from a language where so much is implied, contextual and makes use of ritual phrases and intricate word play.

This unique and remarkable book more than deserves the widest nationwide reading and strong recognition. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force extensively sprayed the enemy's jungle and rural countryside with a chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange to deprive the Vietcong of forest cover. However, Agent Orange was then well-known to be heavily contaminated with dioxin, the most potent known human carcinogen. The pain of agonizing diseases, cancers, and deaths in small towns and villages is told in their own words, by victims or their family members, in heart moving, yet non-accusatory detachment against the U.S. chemical warfare.

* M.D., Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health *

The editors have included some of the best-known contemporary authors in Vietnam in this intelligently selected and well-translated collection of essays concerning the inevitable suffering caused by Agent Orange. Their combined voices allow us to share some of the pain and human consequences that resulted from a war against the environment itself, and inexorably, agonizingly, remind us of our connection to, and responsibility for, that damage. It is only through the intimacy of imaginative literature that one can begin to experience the depth of that destruction and the wreckage of individual lives.

* author of Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam *

Military, literary and social issues collections alike will find this packed with experiences, insights, and social commentary key to understanding the Vietnamese experience, and will find this offers a powerful, literary collection.

In this long-awaited collection of twelve translated short stories and an essay on Agent Orange by Vietnamese writers, the hefty environmental and physical consequences of the Vietnam War are for the first time exposed through literature, evoking the near-impossibility of healing after a war that destroyed nations, spirits, morals and many more . . . Intertwining histories and folklores with family memories and narratives, these stories share the burden and responsibility of portraying an intergenerational aspect of dioxin contamination, evoking both a borderless empathy and difficult moral choices for a quiet reconciliation.