An essential survival guide - both to pandemic influenza, and to the hype surrounding it.
Written by an emergency physician and a public health physician, The Flu Pandemic and You is a timely and forthright guide on how to prepare for an influenza pandemic, and how to understand the broader context in which this health threat exists.
With cool heads and professional expertise, Drs. Lam and Lee carefully explain how readers can assess their level of risk, and set out practical advice on how to contend with a pandemic, addressing such issues as:
• How the flu virus works and what level of threat Canadians really face
• How to help protect yourself and your family from contracting influenza
• How to identify symptoms
• What you need to know about antiviral drugs
• What to do in a worst-case scenario
The Flu Pandemic and You develops a lucid framework to help people understand the current anxiety about influenza in the context of the risks we all face in our daily lives. This crucially important book, full of reasoned, knowledgeable advice, is an indispensable resource for fearful times.
From Giller Prize winner, internationally acclaimed, and bestselling author Vincent Lam comes a superbly crafted, highly suspenseful, and deeply affecting novel set against the turmoil of the Vietnam War.
Percival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English school in Saigon. He is also a bon vivant, a compulsive gambler and an incorrigible womanizer. He is well accustomed to bribing a forever-changing list of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of the Chen Academy. He is fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, and quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided country. He devotedly ignores all news of the fighting that swirls around him, choosing instead to read the faces of his opponents at high-stakes mahjong tables. But when his only son gets in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities, Percival faces the limits of his connections and wealth and is forced to send him away. In the loneliness that follows, Percival finds solace in Jacqueline, a beautiful woman of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage, and Laing Jai, a son born to them on the eve of the Tet offensive. Percival's new-found happiness is precarious, and as the complexities of war encroach further and further into his world, he must confront the tragedy of all he has refused to see.
Blessed with intriguingly flawed characters moving through a richly drawn historical and physical landscape, The Headmaster's Wager is a riveting story of love, betrayal and sacrifice.
"A masterfully paced exploration of a world convulsed by war, wherein faith and reason no longer hold sway...Lam marshals his characters with humor suspense, and tenderness as the fall of Saigon looms...[and] depicts a world caught in an implacable cycle of violence, leavened only by the grace of a father's love." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Through the eyes of Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri, Vincent Lam finds conflict - and humanity - in the most surprising moments. Together these doctors test the boundaries of intimacy as they cope with exam pressure, weigh moral dilemmas as they dissect cadavers, confront police who assault their patients, and treat schizophrenics with pathologies similar to their own. Winner of the 2006 Giller Prize for fiction - the only debut work ever to have won the prestigious literary prize - Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the lives of doctors and their patients and illuminates a deeper understanding of the fears, choices, and temptations that face us all. "Vincent Lam's book is amazing, beautiful, and painful. I cannot believe that a writer can emerge, so fully-formed and incisive, with his first book. This guy is a star." - Sherman Alexie, bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Flight
