Josh Swensen (otherwise known as Larry) can't seem to get off the couch. His usual overactive imagination and save-the-world mindset have all but vanished, and his best friend Beth is seriously worried.When Beth coaxes Josh into taking a walk at Walden Pond, Josh meets Gus Muldarian, a spiritual guru who convinces him to join his study group as a way to find deeper meaning in life. Josh thinks Gus is a joke. Still, feeling desperate and seeing no way out of his rut, he agrees to try it. What begins as a harmless Thoreau-esque search for meaning soon turns into Josh's most chaotic and profound adventure yet. After the success of The Gospel According to Larry and Vote for Larry, Janet Tashjian returns with yet another tour de force—a book that explores important topics and will keep teens hooked right until the unexpected end.
Larry is a young penguin on a secret quest for the meaning of life that teams up with a lost polar bear named Marsha who has walked halfway around the world searching for her destiny. Captured by a scientist, the unusual pair is transported to a zoo in Alaska where the scientist's dying six-year-old son frees them from captivity and joins their search. Readers are taken on an often humorous, yet deeply philosophical, satirical, iconoclastic, emotional, and sure to be controversial adventure leading to the discovery of the Round Song and the secret of life. This unusual novel isn't for children.
Those were the magic words and Beth knew it. How many times had I uttered that phrase to Ms. Robinson in guidance, the standard answer for what I wanted to do with my life? CHANGE THE WORLD. Did I still have the strength and determination to get it together and try to make a difference? Was it my destiny, my vocation? Or was I just trying to impress a girl? As I looked at Beth, I wondered if the reason why even mattered. The indefatigable Larry is back, and this time he takes on the American political system After falling off the wagon and becoming what he so clearly and strongly resisted-a consumer-Josh Swensen (aka Larry) finds himself in a hyper-paranoid state of no return. That is, until he's kidnapped and coaxed into resurfacing as his old persona. Before long, Larry is back on the scene with much more on his mind than a gospel Web site-this time Larry wants to affect change in government. What starts out as a campaign to get the younger population to vote turns into a run for the presidency. Can Larry really take on George Bush? In this very smart, very witty novel, Janet Tashjian brings the political world to the forefront and explores it from many different points of view.
Motorcycle riders from all walks of life--from Main Street to Wall Street, Hollywood to Washington, D.C.--are invited to peel back their "badass" masks and answer one simple question: What is the meaning of life? Their answers expose the motorcycle community's lesser-known philosophical and charitable nature and help to smash the typical motorcycle-rider stereotype. Joining the "regular folks" interviewed are celebrities, including Peter Fonda, Gen. Tommy Franks, John Paul DeJoria, Jillian Michaels, Kyle Petty, Carey Hart, and Norman Reedus, along with a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a congressman, a senator, a former NASA astronaut, governors, military generals, actors, rock n'roll and country artists, corporate executives, and NFL, NBA, MLB sports figures. Whether you drive on four wheels or straddle a "wild thang" on two, these voices are sure to enlighten and entertain.
The popular Six-Word Memoir(r) project examines a subject bursting with words: Jewish life. With contributions from machers like Larry David, Jonathan Safran Foer, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Gary Shteyngart, Maira Kalman, Walter Mosley, Art Spiegelman, A.J. Jacobs and Ed Koch, along with hundreds of first-time writers, Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life offers stories of faith and family, duty and identity, celebration and tsuris that will inform, delight and inspir
Is establishing and enjoying loving relationships important to your life? It ought to be, as many of your most important needs in life are met only through relationships. The quality of those relationships will greatly depend on how well you and your partner can do two things: (1) properly manage your emotions during times of stress, deprivation, and trials, and (2) recognize and meet the emotional needs of your partner. These skills are not inborn, nor can they be casually acquired. But only those who possess them can expect to enjoy happy, loving, fulfilling relationships. In The Emotional Foundations of Loving Relationships, you will learn: The Ten Secrets of Emotionally Fulfilling Relationships The Five Great Destroyers of Relationships How to identify and meet your partner's top twenty emotional needs How your emotions can influence critical life decisions How to distinguish uplifting emotions from destructive emotions What it means to be emotionally responsible The consequences of emotional irresponsibility How to manage your emotions constructively Why there is opposition, stress, and trials in life Ten Potent Weapons for Battling the Forces of Emotional Darkness
With 2014 marking the 60th anniversary of the release of Elvis Presley’s first record, “That’s All Right,” this book makes the perfect companion for celebrating the life and music of one of the world’s most popular entertainers. Packed with history, trivia, lists, little-known facts, and must-do adventures, legions of Elvis fans around the globe who still adore him more than three decades after his death will delight in this ode to “The King.” Ranked from one to 100, the songs, albums, movies, places, personalities, and events that are the most important to know in Elvis lore unfold on the pages, offering hours of entertainment for both casual and serious fans.
How significant relationship rifts affect people in therapy, and how therapists can help. Scratch the surface of almost any family and you will undoubtedly find a significant cutoff. Nearly everyone has someone in their lives with whom they stopped speaking for one reason or another, or someone who abruptly cut them off. Often these severed ties are forever unresolved, and the emotional strain and upset they cause—even if seemingly in the background of one’s life—never go away. Here, Elena Lesser Bruun and Suzanne Michael have gathered many stories about emotional cutoffs from psychotherapists, and personal stories from a host of laypeople they encountered in the course of writing this book. Based on their collective clinical experience spanning decades of work with clients, the authors identify basic themes, categories, and cutoff types. They then offer a set of guidelines to facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics of cutoffs, suggesting strategies for clinicians to use as they work with clients to overcome the emotional devastation that this sort of relationship breach can cause. Given the magnitude of the problem, its ubiquity, and the psychological complexity associated with it, this book is sorely needed. Each chapter addresses a particular cause for cutoffs, such as abandonment, jealousy, betrayal, matters of principle, and mental illness or substance abuse. All types of relationships are considered: parent-child, other relatives, siblings, former spouses, colleagues, and friends. Close analysis of all these scenarios led the authors to reach many conclusions about cutoffs and how to address them in therapy, including: • Cutoffs are common experiences—prevalent, sometimes embarrassing, and thus an elephant in the therapy room. • Cutoffs are extremely damaging even though people often tell themselves the other person is expendable. They induce involuntary suppression of feelings. • The aftermath of cutoffs can include depression, devastation, dismay, shock, isolation, as well as work problems and physical/psychosomatic issues. • Cutoffs, even decades old, are not always clients’ presenting problem; however, they often surface in the course of therapy.. • Clinicians often fail to identify cutoffs in their clients’ lives, or encourage clients to explore what happened, and to consider taking steps towards reconciliation. The author’s hypothesize reasons for therapists’ hesitancy and suggest ways to overcome it. Helping clients to successfully deal with emotional cutoffs will lead to reduction in self-blame for any lost relationships, less reactivity, and lower anxiety in general. No therapist dealing with this all-too-common, challenging issue should be without this book.
The "I" is the big mystery of life. The "I" is a miraculous unit of reflective self-consciousness that is aware of its own individuality and separateness from life; and although every "I" is made of the same individuated consciousness of life, each "I," in the words of the poet John Keats, possesses "a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence." The "I" is who we are. It is our distinct individual core identity. Like snowflakes, we are all different but the same; but how do we become different? Better still, how do we even become a distinct, separate "I"?
The American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty dismisses the public applicability of Jewish moral reasoning, because it is based on “the will of God” through divine revelation. As a self-described secular philosopher, it comes as no surprise that Rorty does not find public applicability within a divinely-ordered Jewish ethic. Rorty also rejects the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, which is based upon the notion of infinite responsibility to the Face of the Other. In Rorty’s judgment, Levinas’s ethics is “gawky, awkward, and unenlightening.” From a Rortyan perspective, it seems that Jewish ethics simply can’t win: either it is either too dependent on the will of God or over-emphasizes the human Other. This book responds to Rorty’s criticisms of Jewish ethics in three different ways: first, demonstrating agreements between Rorty and Jewish thinkers; second, offering reflective responses to Rorty’s critiques of Judaism on the questions of Messianism, prophecy, and the relationship between politics and theology; third, taking on Rorty’s seemingly unfair judgment that Levinas’s ethics is “gawky, awkward, and unenlightening.” While Rorty does not engage the prophetic tradition of Jewish thought in his essay, “Glorious Hopes, Failed Prophecies,” he dismisses the possibility for prophetic reasoning because of its other-worldliness and its emphasis on predicting the future. Rorty fails to attend to and recognize the complexity of prophetic reasoning, and this book presents the complexity of the prophetic within Judaism. Toward these ends and more, Brad Elliott Stone and Jacob L. Goodson offer this book to scholars who contribute to the Jewish academy, those within American Philosophy, and those who think Richard Rorty’s voice ought to remain in “conversations” about religion and “conversations” among the religious.
