Intrepid Pigeon, The

(Order now and also receive "Bittersweet Dreams," a cd of smooth jazz original compositions performed on synthesizer by the author Berge Wassilian and mixed on his laptop computer.) Life was fast and furious in Beirut's Armenian refugee camps. You had to reinvent the wheel at every turn, just to survive. You had to be quick on your feet and your nickname all but defined who you were. In the Teero refugee camp of the 1960s, ""Musician Tigran's Son"" spent a childhood steeped in the indignities of abject poverty, but also the discreet joys of a vivid imagination and an adventurous spirit. In a style at once brutally honest and achingly sensitive, Berge Wassilian takes his novel's self-deprecating hero on a magical mystery tour from the slums to the suburbs, the sobering imagery of Lebanon's civil war, immigration, and a new dawn half a world away, in America. Now a well-to-do Angeleno in his 40s, Wassilian's protagonist finds himself ridden with the angst of a comfortable life and a portable computer begging him to open the floodgates of rumination. He begins to write, not knowing the first thing about the journey. What he ends up experiencing is much more than the fleshing-out of wondrous memories: he rediscovers himself- and the distinct possibility of personal transformation. During the journey, the author searches for the invisible hands of God, finds Him, quarrels with Him, and tries to change His callous methods of disciplining human beings. The book also includes a tribute to the unsung writer Tigran Wassilian (the author's father) through a translation of some of his witty maxims and aphorisms. In a nutshell, the author is in search of the reasons for his self-hatred; he needs to revive his buried pride in order to become content with the achievement of his American dream. That pride seems to have been buried with his father when he was 10 years old. By writing, he goes back in time, re-visits his childhood years, settles some unfinished business with his tormenters, relives Lebanon's beautiful warless and the miserable civil war years and realizes that in order to restore his self-respect and wipe out his bitterness, first he had to resurrect his peace-loving father's lost image. The Intrepid Pigeon is a work bursting with energy. Touching, inspirational, and often hilarious, it is replete with poetic yet deceptively simple lines, making for unforgettable stories that elevate the local to the universal.