Inprint - New Books of interest

All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. (Penguin $14.00, Paperback.)

Yumi Fuller, a Japanese-American prodigal daughter, returns home to the Idaho farm from which she fled some twenty years earlier. Now a single mother with three children, she must face her own conflicted past — her dying father, her Alzheimer’s-devastated mother, and the best friend she left behind. What Yumi doesn’t count on is the untimely arrival of her former lover and high school teacher, now a spin doctor for agribusiness, as well as the Seeds of Resistance, a food activist group that manages to stir up trouble wherever they plant themselves.

Moving from Hawaii to Ohio and ultimately to the epicenter of the post-millennial potato farming industry, Power County, Idaho, this novel tackles the complex issues of our modern world — the dire and often comic contradictions of corporate PR, environmental depletion, political resistance, youth culture vs. aging baby boomers — and weaves these together with the timeless human concerns of birth and death, love and family.

Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. (Harper Collins, $24.95, Hardcover.)

This international bestseller, now being published in the United States, tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that love only makes you suffer. A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Instead, she ends up working as a prostitute.

In Geneva, she drifts further and further away from love as she develops a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria’s despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, she has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness — sexual pleasure for its own sake — or risking everything to find her own inner light and the possibility of sex in the context of love.

Excess Baggage: Getting Out of Your Own Way by Judith Sills, Ph.D. (Penguin, $14.00, Paperback.)

Are you standing in the way of your own happiness? Maybe you always have to finish what you start — from a book to a dismal marriage. Or your mother is always there when you need her — but sometimes you wish she had somewhere else to go. Each of us has a little too much of our own good thing — it’s excess baggage that’s holding us back.

Every one of us has personality baggage, and those who don’t think they do are blind. It’s impossible not to be, because our baggage is the natural outgrowth of personality strengths. It is these strengths, taken to excess, that create the behaviors that make life harder than it has to be. When a proud asset is also the source of a problem, how could that be anything but difficult to recognize? Excess Baggage shines a light on our blind spots, defining five common obstacles to happiness that we create. They are: Our need to be right, our feeling of superiority, our dread of rejection, our need to create drama, and our attachment to anger. Using easy-to-follow but powerful psychological exercises, Dr. Sills helps you to discover just what it is about yourself that keeps you from getting what you want. Then you can set your excess baggage down forever and get out of your own way.

The Light of Conscience: How a Simple Act Can Change Your Life by Bill Shore. (Random House, $22.95, Hardcover.)

The Light of Conscience is about a simple life lesson often taught around dinner tables, in classrooms, and even in board meetins: that one person can make a difference.

As the founder and CEO of the non-profit organization Share Our Strength, which has raised more that $100 million to support anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations worldwide, Bill Shore has seen how simple, solitary acts of conscience can change the world. Citing numerous examples, both historic and contemporary, this book tells readers how to develop the ability to hear and abide by their conscience, how to instill a sense of conscience in children, and how to implement conscience-driven leadership styles and strategies. From well known examples, like Rosa Parks keeping her seat on the bus, to lesser-known individual heroics, like Jan Karski of the Polish underground who took enormous risk to bring word and proof of the Holocaust to the attention of world leaders during World War II, each story shows how individual acts not only create immediate change but also how they ripple across lifetimes. Shore also discusses “moral entrepreneurs,” people who introduce moral principals into the for-profit sector and show their business colleagues the impact they can have on their communities.

The Light of Conscience says the most sweeping change often results from a single individual armed only with the courage to follow his or her conscience, and challenges the belief that creating change requires an array of external resources such as acts of Congress, great sums of money, or powerful lobbyists. Shore also articulates the rewards to the individual: the unforeseen benefits that accrue form these acts, how one gains more than was sacrificed, and the transformative power and richness of living a life of conscience. He inspires us all to play some role, large or small, in improving the world around us and, in turn, ourselves.

The Way of the Warrior: The Paradox of the Martial Arts by Howard Reid and Michael Croucher. (Overlook Press, $26.95, Paperback.)

The combat techniques of the martial arts of India and the Far East have origins shrouded in mystery and practices protected by traditions of secrecy. In The Way of the Warrior, the world’s great masters, experts dedicated to the purest expression of the martial arts, reveal the principles and philosophies that inform their discipline, training, and technique. The disciplines covered in this book are Kalaripayit and Mama-Adi from India: Shaolin (better known as Kung Fu), Tai-chi, and others from China: Bujutsu, Karate, Aiki-do, Kempo, Naginata-do, and others from Japan. The wise words of the masters are accompanied by more than 150 photos and illustrations, ranging from ancient paintings of legendary battles and martial arts masters, to photographs of ancient weapons, to diagrams of martial arts techniques, and more.

An overview of the martial arts like no other and a must-read for any enthusiast, The Way of the Warrior brings to light the essential paradox of the martial arts — that the study of a lethal skill can lead to spiritual enlightenment.

What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living by Lavinia Plonka. (Jeremy P. Tarcher, $21.95, Hardcover.)

We often think of fear as something based in our minds, but equally true and rarely understood is that fear is based in our bodies. The ordinary manner in which we carry ourselves physically, our automatic gestures, and the accustomed comforts of our bodily habits inadvertently reinforce fear’s hold on our lives. This is true whether we’re thinking of asking our boss for a raise, frightened of diving into a swimming pool, or experiencing a night of sleepless anxiety.

These fears often arise from physical and mental triggers that have been learned over the course of our early lives, and can be unlearned. Through her somatic bodywork practice and her workshops, Livinia Plonka has worked with hundreds of people who were in physical or emotional pain or felt paralyzed in their lives. In many cases, the root cause was some sort of fear that manifested itself in and perpetuated itself through the way her clients held and used their bodies. Plonka taught them, and now teaches us, that overcoming our fears can be as simple as learning to move differently.

Filled with case histories, personal anecdotes, and step-by-step exercises, What Are You Afraid Of? guides us to living more courageously by tuning in to our bodies and breaking out of the repetitive body-mind cycle that locks us into the fear response.