Reader recommendation: The Eaves of Heaven

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

In The Eaves of Heaven Andrew X. Pham tells about his life as a Vietnamese child during French colonial times, as a young man during the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, and then as a husband and father during the war between South and North Vietnam. To learn about these times through the eyes of one who lived through them, suffered greatly, and somehow emerged intact, moved me. Pham's perspective is so important for us in the US to hear and to heed.