The Can Tho Children's Hospital is a 180-bed facility in Vietnam, treating children with malaria, dengue fever, dysentery and the effects of the chemical weapon Agent Orange. Salt Spring Islander David Kos has fictionalized some of his own experiences in Vietnam, where he taught English as a second language, and he has represented the Can Tho Hospital as a major setting, in order to self-publish his novel entitled A Measure of Undoing (Trafford $23.45). The central characters are American. Having worked at the hospital for 30 years, Dr. Seb Kloster is estranged from the United States, bitter about the devastation wrought by an unnecessary war, and sickened by the napalm-induced deformities and poverty of the people he treats. He has taken refuge from his pain with opium and with a lover named Ky who manages a high class brothel on the boats of the Mekong River. His two closest friends are a one-legged cyclo driver named Hao whose life he saved as a child after Hao stepped on a landmine at age ten and needed his leg amputated, and an heroic colleague at the hospital named Dr. Trang Anh Nguyen. Kloster's shakey equilibrium is upset by the arrival of an obnoxious, multi-millionaire American entrepreneur, Richard Samuelson, who wants to build a shoe factory that will pay Vietnamese workers 1/400th of what his factory workers would be paid in the U.S. Fifty percent of proceeds from the sale of the book go to Doctors Without Borders. Kloster discovers he cannot allow Samuelson to proceed unimpeded. "This book," wrote reviewer Goody Niosi, "lyrically and beautifully written, brings alive the stifling heat of the Mekong Delta, the raw pain and sorrow as well as the joy and resilience of the people who inhabit this land--it brings alive tension and suspense and it leaves us somehow questioning, What is right? What is justice? How far should one go?" 1-4120-0573-6