Join Michael Lisagor on his hunt for lost treasure in the jungles of urban America and the depths of his life, as he transforms from a confused and sad teenager into a creative and happy adult, father and spouse. With warmth and wit, Lisagor chronicles his thirty-six years of applying Buddhist practice and principles to his life.
Gain a better understanding of Nichiren Buddhism, learn how to apply Buddhist principles to your life, raise happy children, overcome major challenges and build successful, loving relationships with Romancing the Buddha. The book also contains an overview of Nichiren Buddhism as well as a glossary of Buddhist terms.
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Bernard Schwartz has lost his wife, his career, and finally, thanks to the accidental combination of two classes of antidepressants, his consciousness. He emerges from a coma to find his son Chris, the perpetual smart-ass, and his daughter Cathy, a Jewish teen turned self-martyred Catholic, stumbling headlong toward trauma-induced maturity. The Sleeping Father is about the loss of innocence, the disorienting innocence of second childhood, the biochemical mechanics of sanity and love, the nature of language and meaning, and the spirituality of selfhood. But most of all it is about the Schwartzes, a typical American family making their way the best way they know how in a small town called Bellwether,
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As dementia overtakes Hannah Pearl, she slips backward in memory to her escape from France in 1940; boarding the ferry with her heavy bags; the whistle of bombs raining down on London; the family she left behind. Her daughter Miranda, distraught by Hannah’s fading lucidity and sudden switch to her childhood French, tries desperately to hold her in the present. Fiona, a new mother and the older of Hannah’s two granddaughters, ignores the ghosts of her grandmother’s past, while her sister, fiery Ida, seeks to delve into Hannah’s story, eventually returning to France to find the roots of her grandmother’s life—and her own.
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Jacob Green doesn’t mean to disappoint his father, but he can’t help thinking the most unthinkable (and very funny) thoughts about public-school humiliation, Hebrew-school disinclination, and in-home sex education (with the live-in nanny!). If only his mother hadn’t started college at thirty-six (and fallen for her psychology professor). If only he were more like his rebellious older brother (suspended from Hebrew school for drawing the rabbi in a threesome with a lobster and a pig). If only Jacob could confront his overbearing father and tell him he doesn’t want to sing in synagogue, attend est classes, write the perfect thank-you note,
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In the early 1960s, Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sell ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
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Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman devastated by his tragic love affair with a married Frenchwoman, joins the army when World War I breaks out. In 1916, now an officer, he commands a brigade of soldiers in a bizarre campaign waged beneath German lines. On this nightmarish battlefield, Stephen will become both death’s agent and its dispassionate witness. And he will be reunited with the woman whose memory he tried so desperately to erase. Birdsong is at once an erotic love story and a powerful evocation of the carnage of war.
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