Following the route taken by British explorer Ivan Champion in 1927, and amid breathtaking landscapes and wildlife, Salak traveled across this remote Pacific island - often called the last frontier of adventure travel - by dugout canoe and on foot. Along the way, she stayed in a village where cannibals m was still practiced behind the backs of the missionaries, met the leader of the OPM - the separatist guerrilla movement opposing the Indonesian occupation of Western New Guinea - and undertook an epic trek through the jungle. The New York Times said ''Kira Salak is tough, a real - life Lara Croft.'' And Edward Marriott, proclaimed Four Corners to be ''A travel book that transcends the genre?It is, like all the best travel narratives, a resonant interior journey, and offers wisdom for our times.''

2016 Books For A Better Life Award winner Drawing on the latest research and remarkable tales of forgiveness from around the world, journalist Megan Feldman explores how forgiveness, when practiced in the right ways, can save lives, make us happier and healthier, and lead to a better world. Veteran journalist Megan Feldman was still smarting over a bitter breakup when she began working on a feature article about a father named Azim who had truly forgiven the man who killed his son. She had found herself totally and completely unable to forgive her ex-boyfriend, and yet Azim had managed to forgive his own son’s murderer. Forgiveness has long been touted by religious leaders as a moral imperative. But Megan wanted to know exactly what it means from a scientific perspective, and why forgiving those who have wronged you is one of the best things you can do for yourself. In Triumph of the Heart, Feldman embarks on a quest to understand this complex idea, drawing on the latest research showing that forgiveness can provide a range of health benefits, from relieving depression to decreasing high blood pressure. The journey takes her from New Zealand and the Maori who practice their own form of restorative justice, to a principal in Baltimore who uses forgiveness techniques to eradicate violence in her school, and to recovered addicts who restarted their lives by seeking and receiving forgiveness. She travels to Rwanda to learn about forgiveness in the face of unthinkable atrocities. This book is a guide for how the practice of forgiveness can help us all in our search for a satisfying, fulfilling, good life.

A collection of folk stories from around the world, each accompanied by background information, that explain the various perspectives of different peoples on how the universe and their world came to be.

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man's struggle to adhere to the philosophy of yoin ma do, which the narrator quickly translates into his pidgin Japanese-hipster English to mean. ..Go with do flow,"' meaning, as the story unfolds, to take life's ironies as they come.

A combination biography and cultural history chronicles the lives of Navajo Ella Bedonie and her extended family, from Ella's childhood on the Four Corners Reservation to her education and marriage.

One of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads" The basis for the critically-acclaimed film, Heal the Living, directed by Katell Quillévéré and starring Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner Albertine Prize Finalist Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, the boys are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating. The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose, it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved as they navigate decisions of life and death. As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, The Heart mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star. With the precision of a surgeon and the language of a poet, de Kerangal has made a major contribution to both medicine and literature with an epic tale of grief, hope, and survival.

"There's humor and action aplenty, but Four Corners is also a warmhearted look at how we love and forgive. Five hundred and forty-four pages never seemed so short"—People, 4 stars, People Pick The Four Corners of the Sky is master storyteller Michael Malone's new novel of love, secrets, and the mysterious bonds of families. Malone brings characters to life as only he can, exploring the questions that defy easy answers: Is love a choice or a calling? Why do the ties of family bind so tightly? And is forgiveness a gift to others...or a gift we give ourselves? In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky...The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine's seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life. Thus begins an enchanting novel that bursts with energy from the first pages, and sweeps you off on a journey of unforgettable characters, hilarious encounters, and haunting secrets. Praise for The Four Corners of the Sky: "Devoted Michael Malone fans have been waiting more than twenty years for another Handling Sin, perhaps the greatest road novel since Tom Jones. The wait is over..."— Bill Ott, editor-in-chief, Booklist "Secrets and intrigues among the honeysuckle: a sun-washed yarn of the New South, affectionately told." —Kirkus starred review "The Four Corners of the Sky is the best thing I have read in years and you can imagine how much I read. Truly, I couldn't put it down. I loved it."—Kathy Ashton, The King's English Bookshop BONUS READING GROUP GUIDE INCLUDED

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A thrilling and emotionally powerful novel from the author of the Jane Hawk series “A literary miracle . . . a tapestry of intrigue and suspense.”—The Boston Globe His birth was marked by wonder and tragedy. He sees beauty and terror beyond our deepest dreams. His story will change the way you see the world. Bartholomew Lampion is born on a day of tragedy and terror that will mark his family forever. All agree that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen. On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He embarks on a relentless search to find this enemy, a search that will consume his life. And a girl is born from a brutal rape, her destiny mysteriously linked to Barty and the man who stalks him. At the age of three, Barty Lampion is blinded when surgeons remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. As he copes with his blindness and proves to be a prodigy, his mother counsels him that all things happen for a reason and that every person’s life has an effect on every other person’s, in often unknowable ways. At thirteen, Bartholomew regains his sight. How he regains it, why he regains it, and what happens as his amazing life unfolds and entwines with others results in a breathtaking journey of courage, heart-stopping suspense, and high adventure.

The myth of Shangri-la originates in Tibetan Buddhist beliefs in beyul, or hidden lands, sacred sanctuaries that reveal themselves to devout pilgrims and in times of crisis. The more remote and inaccessible the beyul, the vaster its reputed qualities. Ancient Tibetan prophecies declare that the greatest of all hidden lands lies at the heart of the forbidding Tsangpo Gorge, deep in the Himalayas and veiled by a colossal waterfall. Nineteenth-century accounts of this fabled waterfall inspired a series of ill-fated European expeditions that ended prematurely in 1925 when the intrepid British plant collector Frank Kingdon-Ward penetrated all but a five-mile section of the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge and declared that the falls were no more than a “religious myth” and a “romance of geography.” The heart of the Tsangpo Gorge remained a blank spot on the map of world exploration until world-class climber and Buddhist scholar Ian Baker delved into the legends. Whatever cryptic Tibetan scrolls or past explorers had said about the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, Baker determined, could be verified only by exploring the uncharted five-mile gap. After several years of encountering sheer cliffs, maelstroms of impassable white water, and dense leech-infested jungles, on the last of a series of extraordinary expeditions, Baker and his National Geographic–sponsored team reached the depths of the Tsangpo Gorge. They made news worldwide by finding there a 108-foot-high waterfall, the legendary grail of Western explorers and Tibetan seekers alike. The Heart of the World is one of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery in recent memory—an extraordinary journey to one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on earth and a pilgrimage to the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist faith.

D.H. Lawrence, writing of the poems that had meant most to him, said that they were `still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood'. It is not easy to account for this, and most writing about hymns has not helped because it has concentrated on their content and function in worship and liturgy. In the present book the author tries to account for feelings like Lawrence's by examining the hymn form and its progress through the centuries from the Reformation to the present day. He begins by discussing the status of a hymn text and relates it to the demands made upon it by the needs of singing. A chronological study then traces the development of the English hymn, from the metrical psalms of the Reformation, through the seventeenth century and Isaac Watts to the Wesleys, Cowper, Toplady, and others, and then to the great flood of hymn writing that occurred during the Victorian period, together with the great success of Hymns Ancient and Modern. There are chapters on American hymnody and women's hymn writing, and sections on gospel hymns and the translation of German hymnody. A final chapter takes the story into the twentieth century, with a brief postscript on the revival of hymn writing since 1960.