Dr. Hale's incredible experience in tiny, mountainous Nepal are surpassed only by his talent for telling about them. Imagine, for example, the culture shock of moving to a Hindu country under such rigid religious control that it is not only illegal to proselytize, but illegal to change religions as well. Imagine further the shock of moving to that country as a missionary doctor. Thomas Hale and his wife, Cynthia, also a physician, too on that awesome challenge in 1970.God wasted no time teaching tom the peculiarities of his new culture. But His unusual method left Tom wondering what God was up to. Here is how Tom tells about it:"These were not the phlegmatic, easy-going Nepalis described in books and orientation courses. Those who spoke gesticulated fiercely. Some looked around menacingly; others spat. One thing was certain, however: in the cause of their anger they were united. The word was out: the new doctor had killed a cow. My own sense of participation in the proceedings was intense. I was the new doctor."--ExcerptAs Tom goes on to describe the events the preceded the angry scene in the Nepali village, the image of the spiritually superior missionary quickly evaporates. In a humorous, yet deeply insightful way, the author makes it clear that he is merely a servant, using his skills to the glory of God.Tom concludes this chapter with a thoughtful confession:"In the long run, that cow did much more for me that I did for it. The mild-mannered, uncritical beast made me see in myself those negative attributes I had always ascribed to other American surgeons. Facing two hundred angry men proved to be effective therapy for removing most traces of condescension with which I previously regarded them. It also improved my relations with missionary colleagues and with Nepali brothers and sisters in the church. I guess God had no gentler way of removing some of my imperfections. I only wish I could say, for His trouble, that He finished the job. But it was a start." -- Excerpt.Dr. Hale's book refused to be preachy or condescending. It presents missions as a "want" rather than an "ought." It is sensitive, warm, honest, incredibly funny, and filled with important truths illustrated from unusual and sometimes unimaginable situations.

    Alex Kerr brings to life the ritualized world of Kabuki, retraces his initiation into Tokyo's boardrooms during the heady Bubble Years, and tells the story of the hidden valley that became his home.But the book is not just a love letter. Haunted throughout by nostalgia for the Japan of old, Kerr's book is part paean to that great country and culture, part epitaph in the face of contemporary Japan's environmental and cultural destruction.Winner of Japan's 1994 Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize.Alex Kerr is an American writer, antiques collector and Japanologist. Lost Japan is his most famous work. He was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan.

    In The First Muslim, Lesley Hazleton brings him vibrantly to life. Drawing on early eyewitness sources and on history, politics, religion, and psychology, she renders him as a man in full, in all his complexity and vitality.        Hazleton’s account follows the arc of Muhammad’s rise from powerlessness to power, from anonymity to renown, from insignificance to lasting significance. How did a child shunted to the margins end up revolutionizing his world? How did a merchant come to challenge the established order with a new vision of social justice? How did the pariah hounded out of Mecca turn exile into a new and victorious beginning? How did the outsider become the ultimate insider?        Impeccably researched and thrillingly readable, Hazleton’s narrative creates vivid insight into a man navigating between idealism and pragmatism, faith and politics, nonviolence and violence, rejection and acclaim. The First Muslim illuminates not only an immensely significant figure but his lastingly relevant legacy.

    This book explores Khan's control over Mongolia, his attempts to invade Japan, his imperialistic foreign policy, his relationship with Marco Polo during Polo's extraordinary journey to Xanadu, and his overall impact on world history.The book will be released in time for Xanadu to Dadu--The World of Khubilai Khan, a stunning exhibit of artwork that will be featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 2010 until January 2011.

    She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. Here, she had some distance from her community for the first time. Immersion in a foreign language and culture--and a whole new way of thinking--turned her world upside down, and eventually led her to lose all that she had been sure was true.As a proselytizer in Shanghai, using fake names and secret codes to evade the authorities' notice, Scorah discreetly looked for targets in public parks and stores. To support herself, she found work at a Chinese language learning podcast, hiding her real purpose from her coworkers. Now with a creative outlet, getting to know worldly people for the first time, she began to understand that there were other ways of seeing the world and living a fulfilling life. When one of these relationships became an "escape hatch," Scorah's loss of faith culminated in her own personal apocalypse, the only kind of ending possible for a Jehovah's Witness.Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery--with no education or support system. A coming of age story of a woman already in her thirties, this unforgettable memoir examines what it's like to start one's life over again with an entirely new identity. It follows Scorah to New York City, where a personal tragedy forces her to look for new ways to find meaning in the absence of religion. With compelling, spare prose, Leaving the Witness traces the bittersweet process of starting over, when everything one's life was built around is gone.

    This fortuitous interview sparked a magnificent friendship between the two, one that would see both men through periods of grief as well as the hope of new beginnings. I’m Proud of You is the story of this friendship and of the enduring legacy left to us all by Fred Rogers. Tim’s career as a journalist was flourishing when he met Fred Rogers, but his personal life was a shambles. As Rogers welcomed Tim into his family, his church, and his life, Tim found an advisor who imparted a gentle but powerful perspective on spirituality, marriage, depression, and the nature of true friendship. With the television icon’s loving and patient guidance, Tim eventually came to understand that his emotional troubles were rooted in a deep fear that his father had never truly been proud of him. Hence the mantra of the friendship between the two, the phrase Rogers used to conclude dozens of letters and e-mail messages to Tim: “I’m Proud of You.” Tim’s friendship with Rogers helped him to mend his relationship with his father and become a better husband and father himself, all the while marveling at how many simple pleasures he had overlooked throughout his life.

    Impossibly remote and nearly inaccessible, Bhutan is rich in natural beauty, exotic plants and animals, and crazy wisdom. It is a place where people are genuinely content with very few material possessions and the government embraces “Gross National Happiness” instead of Gross National Product.        In this funny, magical memoir, we accompany Linda Leaming on her travels through South Asia, sharing her experiences as she learns the language, customs, and religion; her surprising romance with a Buddhist artist; and her realizations about the unexpected path to happiness and accidental enlightenment.        As one of the few Americans to have lived in Bhutan, Leaming offers a rare glimpse into the quirky mountain kingdom so many have only dreamed of. For over ten years, Leaming has lived and worked in the town of Thimphu, where there are no traffic lights and fewer than 100,000 people. “If enlightenment is possible anywhere,” she writes, “I think it is particularly possible here.”        The Bhutanese way of life can seem daunting to most Westerners, whose lives are consumed with time, efficiency, and acquiring things. But Leaming shows us that we don’t necessarily have to travel around the world to appreciate a little Bhutan in our own lives, and that following our dreams is the way to be truly happy.

    My stomach is all twisted up with hunger, but I don't want to spend the money on anything as frivolous as food. Because it's money my parents earn with their sweat and blood.I have to study well so that I won't ever again be tortured by hunger. . . .In a drought-stricken corner of rural China, an education can be the difference between a life of crushing poverty and the chance for a better future. But money is scarce, and the low wages paid for backbreaking work aren't always enough to pay school fees.Ma Yan's heart-wrenching, honest diary chronicles her struggle to escape hardship and bring prosperity to her family through her persistent, sometimes desperate, attempts to continue her schooling.First published in France in 2002, the diary of ma yan created an outpouring of support for this courageous teenager and others like her -- support that led to the creation of an international organization dedicated to helping these children . . . all because of one ordinary girl's extraordinary diary.

    This is his account of an entertaining time in the hills!

    But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language—a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar—became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones—the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning—is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.

    It is said that he was a contemporary of Mencius, an official in the Lacquer Garden of Meng in Honan Province around the 4th century b.c. Chuang Tsu was to Lao Tsu as Saint Paul was to Jesus and Plato to Socrates.While the other philosophers were busying themselves with the practical matters of government and rules of conduct, Chuang Tsu transcended the whang cheng, the illusory dust of the world—thus anticipating Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on a state of emptiness or ego transcendence. With humor, imagery, and fantasy, he captures the depth of Chinese thinking. The seven “Inner Chapters” presented in this translation are accepted by scholars as being definitely the work of Chuang Tsu. Another twenty-six chapters are of questionable origin; they are interpretations of his teaching and may have been added by later commentators.      This is an updated version of the translation of Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters that was originally published in 1974. Like the original Chinese, this version uses gender-neutral language wherever possible. This edition includes many new photographs by Jane English and an introduction by Tai Ji master Chungliang Al Huang, who has been highly successful in bringing to the West the wisdom of the East.

    Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan explore the intersecting lives of Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Pasang Lama, following them from their villages high in the Himalaya to the slums of Kathmandu, across the glaciers of Pakistan to K2 Base Camp. When disaster strikes in the Death Zone, Chhiring finds Pasang stranded on an ice wall, without an axe, waiting to die. The rescue that follows has become the stuff of mountaineering legend.At once a gripping, white-knuckled adventure and a rich exploration of Sherpa customs and culture, Buried in the Sky re-creates one of the most dramatic catastrophes in alpine history from a fascinating new perspective.

    Book by Shen, Aisling Juanjuan

    I was not to carry any identification, and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel. . . ."For her whole life, Souad Mekhennet, a reporter for The Washington Post who was born and educated in Germany, has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing - Muslim and Western. She has also sought to provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.In this compelling and evocative memoir, we accompany Mekhennet as she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and the Iraqi neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, and culminating on the Turkish/Syrian border region where ISIS is a daily presence. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her chilling run-ins with various intelligence services and shows why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. She then returns to Europe, first in London, where she uncovers the identity of the notorious ISIS executioner "Jihadi John," and then in France, Belgium, and her native Germany, where terror has come to the heart of Western civilization.Mekhennet's background has given her unique access to some of the world's most wanted men, who generally refuse to speak to Western journalists. She is not afraid to face personal danger to reach out to individuals in the inner circles of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and their affiliates; when she is told to come alone to an interview, she never knows what awaits at her destination.Souad Mekhennet is an ideal guide to introduce us to the human beings behind the ominous headlines, as she shares her transformative journey with us. Hers is a story you will not soon forget.

    This book tells the story of her triumph over adversity, told against the backdrop of a turbulent Tibet.