Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award.
On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr., shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier, Dam, when they met on a jungle trail. Steedly took a diary -- filled with beautiful line drawings -- from the body of the dead soldier, which he subsequently sent to his mother for safekeeping. Thirty-five years later, Steedly rediscovers the forgotten dairy and begins to confront his suppressed memories of the war that defined his life, deciding to return to Viet Nam and meet the family of the man he killed to seek their forgiveness. Fellow veteran and award-winning author Wayne Karlin accompanied Steedly on his remarkable journey. In Wandering Souls he recounts Homer's movement towards a recovery that could only come about through a confrontation with the ghosts of his past -- and the need of Dam's family to bring their child's "wandering soul" to his own peace. Wandering Souls limns the terrible price of war on soldiers and their loved ones, and reveals that we heal not by forgetting war's hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.
Have you ever felt like you were teetering on the very brink of insanity? Have you ever had a dream that felt so intense that you thought it was actually real? Here are four short stories that take you to the fringes of reality! A man is lost in a time limbo. An evil billionaire is reincarnated. A teenager is haunted by the ghost of a classmate who isn't even dead yet! Enter the warped world of "Lost Minds, Wandering Souls, Volume 2
In his book, the author describes his life from age two, after the second world war, to seventy today. His early life in an RAF nissen hut in Lytham St Annes; hard times at boarding schools; an archaeological dig at Milton Keynes; lengthy train travel to Istanbul; smallpox requiring departure from Turkey to Cyprus military base, thence by ship to Egypt, Port Alexandria and military train to Luxor, in a country eerily awaiting developments after the destruction of three jumbo jets. He also describes his time in New York, Washington and Philadelphia, meeting his wife while hitch hiking in Ireland; working for two legal firms and for the catholic church, both positive as the latter included the successful visit to the UK by Pope John Paul II, but negative as it involved appalling child protection cases.
Murder is the last thing on Joanne Kilbourn’s mind on a perfect morning in May. Then the phone rings, and she learns that her daughter Mieka has found the corpse of a young woman in an alley near her store. So begins Joanne’s chilling collision with evil in Gail Bowen’s riveting third mystery, The Wandering Soul Murders. Joanne is stunned and saddened by the news that the dead woman, at seventeen, was already a veteran of the streets. When, just twenty-four hours later, her son’s girlfriend is found dead, drowned in a lake in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, Joanne’s sunny world is shattered. Her excitement about Mieka’s upcoming marriage, her involvement in the biography she is writing, even her pleasure at her return to Regina all fade as she finds herself drawn into a twilight world where money can buy anything and there are always people willing to pay.
A journey full of lost souls, gravity defying landscapes, and creatures that stretch the ability of the human imagination await. Simon Floyd, a man whose story on earth is ending, is about to discover firsthand all that the human spirit can conjure. Simon is given a second chance, and though he does not know it, he is about to embark upon an adventure that has the ability to reshape the universe. In his first published novel, author Samuel Kane crafts a new and intricate world that is both familiar and foreign. A world complete with historical figures, fantastical creatures, and an inter-dimensional logic that Simon must learn to navigate if he is to have any chance at redemption. The Pilgrim’s soul is an imaginative romp into the human psyche, transporting readers into a place and time of eternal possibilities. Anyone who has contemplated the afterlife will find something to love in this book.
The third book in Morris Berman's much acclaimed trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness, Wandering God continues his earlier work which garnered such praise as "solid lessons in the history of ideas" (KIRKUS Reviews), "filled with piquant details" (Common Boundary), and "an informative synthesis and a remarkably friendly, good-natured jeremiad" (The Village Voice). Here, in a remarkable discussion of our hunter-gatherer ancestry and the "paradoxical" mode of perception that it involved, Berman shows how a sense of alertness, or secular/sacred immediacy, subsequently got buried by the rise of sedentary civilization, religion, and vertical power relationships. In an integrated tour de force, Wandering God explores the meaning of Paleolithic art, the origins of social inequality, the nature of cross-cultural child rearing, the relationship between women and agriculture, and the world view of present-day nomadic peoples, as well as the emergence of "paradoxical" consciousness in the philosophical writings of the twentieth century.
In this remarkable work, Reiner Schürmann shows Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century Christian mystic, as the great teacher of the birth of God in the soul, which shatters the dualism between God and the world, the self and God. This is an exposition of Eckhar's mysticism--perhaps the best in English--and, because Eckhart is a profound philosopher for whom knowing precedes being, it is also an exemplary work of contemporary philosophy. Schürmann shows us that Eckhart is our contemporary. He describes the threefold movement of detachment, release, and "dehiscence" (splitting open), which leads to the experience of "living without a why," in which all things are in God and sheer joy. Going beyond that, he describes the transformational force of approaching the Godhead, the God beyond God: "A man who has experienced the same no longer has a place to establish himself. He has settled on the road, and for those who have learned how to listen, his existence becomes a call. This errant one dwells in joy. Through his wanderings the origin beckons."
Wake Me, I Am Dreaming is a collection of over 80 brand new, never before published poems about life and self-discovery. It is a journey from whimsical imagination to the wilderness of vulnerability to the connectedness of energy and purpose. Drawing from the inspiration of nature, yoga philosophy, and the wisdom of the soul, the poems in this collection represent an inner tension between a state of dreaming and waking, between what is an illusion and what is real. A modern take on one of life's biggest questions, "Why are we here?", it is a journey of poetic meditation to self-awareness, acceptance and purpose. Wake Me, I Am Dreaming was written for wanderers, dreamers, trailblazers, lightworkers, truth seekers, yoga students and yoga teachers, nature lovers, and anyone on a quest for self-discovery or spirituality - finding purpose and believing in something bigger than yourself. This book of poems will be a beautiful inspirational gift for yourself or a friend. "It's time to decide, which mountains you'll climb. For settling in the valley, lies the enemy of change." This book is divided into sections, each dedicated to a different element which we may encounter on the journey to connection with the true Self. Some of these elements are rooted in nature: the trees, the ocean, the wind and flowers. Others draw from more abstract or unseen forces: the ether, time, the third eye (our intuition). All of them have great wisdom and inspiration to offer. The sections are placed carefully in an order meant to evoke the sensation of moving along a path from dreaming to waking. However, each poem stands beautifully on its own and the reader is invited to travel the contents of this book in whatever way resonates most.
National Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years. “The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.