Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man’s drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)

by Lionel Shriver

In this gripping novel of motherhood gone awry, Lionel Shriver approaches the tragedy of a high-school massacre from the point of view of the killer's mother.In letters written to the boy's father, mother Eva probes the upbringing of this more-than-difficult child and reveals herself to have been the reluctant mother of an unsavory son. As the schisms in her family unfold, we draw closer to an unexpected climax... (more)

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

by Daniel Quinn

A novel that uses a continuing conversation between a gorilla and his pupil to examine mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability. A Socratic style is used through out the book. The novel deconstucts the myth that humans are the end of evolution and that human supremacy is a myth that ourcurrent culture is enacting.

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders

by James D. Scurlock

In this shocking and illuminating road trip through an America ravaged by debt, award-winning film director James Scurlock examines our multitrillion-dollar addiction to easy credit in all of its absurdities and contradictions. Maxed Out ventures beyond the mind-numbing statistics to expose a financial industry spinning wildly out of control. From the gilded master-planned communities of Northern Las Vegas to... (more)

The Things They Carried A Work of Fiction

The Things They Carried A Work of Fiction

by Tim O'Brien

In 1979, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato--a novel about the Vietnam War--won the National Book Award. In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades... (more)

American Fascists

by Chris Hedges

Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran... (more)

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

by Rian Malan

A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of... (more)

Waking the Tiger : Healing Trauma : The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

Waking the Tiger : Healing Trauma : The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

by Peter A. Levine

Nature's Lessons in Healing Trauma... Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of... (more)

The Sirens of Baghdad: A Novel

by Yasmina Khadra

“Yasmina Khadra may well be the most powerful and serious writer in French since his Algerian compatriot Albert Camus.” — Philadelphia Inquirer The third novel in Yasmina Khadra’s bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism brings readers into Baghdad. Forced to leave the University of Baghdad when the Americans invade Iraq, a young man from a small desert village returns home, where he witnesses three... (more)

Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

by Ken McLeod

The key to becoming fully alive and joyful is to develop our natural capacity for attention and to be fully present here and now. In this informative guidebook to practical Buddhism you discover: How to live life with equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy How to cut through obsessions with the external world, relationships, harmful emotions, pleasure and power, and self Tried-and-true methods for... (more)

Returning to the Teachings

by Rupert Ross

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a moving, passionate love story set amid the turmoil and terror of Rwanda’s genocide. All manner of Kigali residents pass their time by the pool of the Mille-Collines hotel: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates, UN peacekeepers, prostitutes. Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel... (more)

Wild: An Elemental Journey

by Jay Griffiths

In Wild , Jay Griffiths describes an extraordinary odyssey through wildernesses of earth, ice, water, and fire. A poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and the wild, the book is by turns passionate, political, funny, and harrowing. It is also a journey into that greatest of uncharted lands-the wilderness of the mind-and Griffiths beautifully explores the language and symbolism that... (more)

Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health

Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health

by Thomas Hanna

The groundbreaking program for healthy aging through movement and flexibility. In the revolutionary Somatics , Thomas Hanna demonstrates that so many problems we accept as inevitable over time--chronic stiffness, bad back, chronic pain, fatigue, and even high blood pressure--need never occur if we maintain conscious control of nerve and muscle, a state which Hanna calls sensory-motor awareness. This gentle,... (more)

Henry's List of Wrongs

by John Scott Shepherd

Henry Chase is every woman's worst nightmare. Nicknamed "The Assassin" by his Wall Street brethren, he'll lie, seduce, betray, manipulate--whatever it takes--to stay on top, in the boardroom and the bedroom. There's not a speck of humanity left in his steely soul until one night when his conscience catches him by surprise and demands a reckoning. With the help of a mysterious young woman, Henry confesses to a... (more)

The Awakening, and Other Stories (Rinehart Editions, 142)

The Awakening, and Other Stories (Rinehart Editions, 142)

by Kate Chopin

The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the... (more)

Selections. (English.)

by Coleman Barks

"Inside a lover's heart there's another world, and yet another." Rumi's delightful yet profound poems have inspired countless people throughout the centuries, and Coleman Barks's exquisite renderings of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic are widely considered the definitive versions for our time. Barks's translations capture the inward exploration and intensity that characterize Rumi's poetry, making this... (more)

Volcanoes of North America: The United States and Canada

Volcanoes of North America: The United States and Canada

Volcanoes of North America capitalises on the vast body of volcano literature now available to present, in a single source, detailed information about volcanoes found in North America. It contains brief accounts, written by leading experts in volcanology, of over 250 volcanoes and volcanic fields formed during the last 5 million years. The volcanoes of the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada are... (more)

Someone Knows My Name: A Novel

by Lawrence Hill

"You feel you are turning the pages of history, the pages of truth."—Austin Clarke, author of The Polished Hoe Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom—and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary... (more)

Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor Emil Frankl, VIKTOR E. FRANKL

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot... (more)

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by Derrick Jensen