Works by
Adam Fifield
(Writer)

• A Blessing over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother (2000)
  From a writer of insight, wit, and compassion
  comes the remarkable story of a boy from the
  killing fields of Cambodia who irrevocably
  changed the life of an American family.
  A Blessing Over Ashes
  
  In clear vivid prose, Adam Fifield recaptures the snowy night when he, at the age of eleven, along with his mother, father, and younger brother, waited to welcome fifteen-year-old Soeuth into the family. The boy shuffled in, short and scrawny, a baseball cap shading his downcast eyes. He spoke not a word, yet a silent terror hovered around him.
  
  The author describes the events of the months that followed: Soeuth's wariness and detachment; his fear of being seized in the night by his parents' ghosts; Adam's discovery of his new brother's amazing physical skills, like catching fish with his bare hands; and Soeuth's eventual and painful emergence from years of darkness. As Soeuth gradually adjusts to rural middle-class America, a world fantastically foreign from the horrors of his homeland, a bond is formed with his new brothers that would permanently affect them all.
  
  In his senior year of high school, Soeuth leaves home, lured by an anesthetic world of drugs and alcohol. Over the next few years, the brothers drift apart, distracted by college, jobs, girlfriends. Then Soeuth finds out that the members of his Cambodian family -- whom, for fourteen years, he has presumed to be dead-are alive. The discovery is the beginning of a new journey -- one that reunites Soeuth with his long-lost brothers, sisters, and parents...and with his American brother Adam.

See also:

• Rudy!: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani (2000) by Wayne Barrett, assisted by Adam Fifield
  Rudy Guiliani. New York City's Mayor. America's Number One Cop. A municipal superhero who needs no phone booth. A politician of astonishing complexity whose full story has never been told. Until now.
  
  Guiliani has assumed mythic proportions, the can-do emblem of the new urban politics. He has been heralded as the ultimate turn-around artist - projecting himself as the reformer who single-handedly salvaged a crime-ridden and blighted New York. From his days in the Eighties as the Michael Milken-busting U.S. Attorney of Manhattan to his current purge of hundreds of thousands from his city's welfare rolls, Giuliani has targeted rich and poor with the same relentless certitude.
  
  This investigative biography starts with the college kid who confided his presidential dream to his girlfriend and practiced future campaign speeches in front of her at home. It analyzes his substantial impact as U.S. Attorney, badly wounding the Mafia, ransacking the white collared halls of Wall Street and forever changing the face of New York politics. It looks at his celebrated crime reduction and other achievements through a new lens, highlighting the single-mindedness that has made Giuliani one of America's most important and controversial figures.
  
  With two marriages as troubled and secretive as his family history, Giuliani is on every New Yorker's therapeutic couch, stirring feelings as intense as the ones that visibly boil inside of him. Though he has become a national legend, his re-election total in 1997 was the lowest in seventy-four years.
  
  Wayne Barrett, co-author of the bestselling City for Sale, draws on twenty years of reporting on Giuliani to bring us the most comprehensive and newsbreaking biography of a man of giant contradictions and unpredictable expectations.