A sweeping portrait of motherhood, loss, and redemption in war-torn Sarajevo.

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer's prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.

A moving and revealing exploration of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and one man's loss of faith Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world—only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow. Deen's first transgression—turning on the radio—is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.

The classic memior of Betty Jean Lifton's search for her secret past that helped open the way for so many others. Betty Jean Lifton, acclaimed author of several books on the psychology of the adtoped that have helped open the field, tells her own story of growing up adtoped in the closed adoption system. Calling Twice Born both an autobiography and a psychological journey into the past, Lifton takes the reader with her as she describes the loneliness and islolation of an adopted child cut off from the knowledge of her heritage. She explores the ambivalence and guilt that she feels toward her adoptive parents when she awakens as an adult to her need to ask: Who am I? With the mounting suspense of a detective novel, Twice Born explores not only the difficulty of searching for one's past when one's records are sealed, but also the complexity of trying to reunite with the birth mother from whom one has been separated by social taboos--and by time. More than a vivid and poinant memior, Lifton has given hs a story of mothering and mother-loss attachment and bonding, secrets and lies, and the human need for origins. Important reading for anyone touched by these issues and by the experience of adoption--which is everyone.

Svarup and Premartha are lovers, friends, and partners. They have been working together in the field of spiritual therapy for many years. This book is the outcome of their experience. In it, you will find a beautiful combination of therapy and meditation, of love and awareness. Twice Born offers a synthesis of the Western and Eastern approaches toward Childhood Deconditioning. It addresses the unresolved issues of our early childhood that play an important part in the way we feel, behave, and relate today. It also supports our rediscovery of the qualities of being, presence, and individuality which we were born with, so we can take them with us into a second birth, towards our Buddha nature. The book leads us through a fascinating journey through time, from before we entered school all the way back to the moment before conception. Each chapter addresses a different developmental stage of childhood. It describes the wounds that can happen at each stage, and the many ways in which they can be healed. It also reveals the natural essences that are part of that specific period. It is a book that receives its inspiration from the rich meditative energy field of a Master. It teaches us how to work on our issues joyfully, bringing compassion towards them. Each chapter is divided in three segments: .An explaining and understanding section, .An evoking section, in which the authors share their experience in healing their inner child .An experimenting section The golden thread throughout this healing journey is a meditative awareness, which will help us in healing the past and creating a new future."

'Once-Born, Twice-Born Zen' is a fresh treatment of the two major Zen schools of Japan. Its biographical and comparative approach is both original and very readable. The use of William James' typology, along with other phenomenological categories, provides the reader with helpful handles for distinguishing the schools, as well as similar tendencies in other religious traditions. The book should make an excellent text for introductory and middle-level courses in which one is trying to get students to develop categories for understanding religious experience and behavior. Readers will see something of themselves in the range of biographical examples given, and will detect their own tendencies through the use of this method. -- Bardwell Smith

Nimrod Twice Born interweaves the dramatic events of Israel at the time of Jesus Christ with a World War II conspiracy thriller. The skills of a Magician, Simon Magus, win him the favour of the wife of Herod Antipas. The magician initiates a conspiracy so intricate and so far-seeing that it will only reach its climax in our time. Matthias von Ingolstadt leaves the horror of the trenches behind at the close of the World War I and returns to a Germany humiliated by the events that have left the country bankrupt and vulnerable. He meets and falls in love with Anna Lejkin, a Jew. What follows appears to solve their racial differences but ultimately leads to discovery, manipulation and disaster. A Jew in Frankfurt, Germany, Michael Segal is caught up in the events preceding the war. His friendship with Gabriele have far-reaching consequences for them both. Heinrich Himmler, the future SS leader of the Third Reich, forms a relationship with Ernst Rohm a battle-hardened veteran of WWI who has a penchant for young men. He promises Himmler the one thing he most desires - power. Nimrod Twice Born is an intricate story of love, romance, witchcraft, power and intrigue. Lyn J Pickering employs history's trail of circumstantial evidence to combine both Christian conspiracy and historical fiction in one bizarre and riveting package."

"Indispensable reading for anyone who wants a wider understanding of the Islamic world, of its history and its politics." —Financial Times Aatish Taseer's fractured upbringing left him with many questions about his own identity. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. Stranger to History is the story of the journey he made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-firstcentury. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Taseer's divided family over the past fifty years. Recent events have added a coda to Stranger to History, as his father was murdered by a political assassin. A new introduction by the author reflects on how this event changes the impact of the book, and why its message is more relevant than ever.