In 1990, Cynthia Jurs climbed a path high in the Himalayas, to meet an “old wise man in a cave,” a highly venerated lama from Nepal, Charok Rinpoche. The question she carried with her was, "How can I bring healing and protection to Earth?" After hearing her question, Charok Rinpoche told Cynthia to procure sacred Earth Treasure Vases made of clay and potent medicines based on an ancient practice from Tibet, fill them with prayers and symbolic offerings, and plant them around the world to relieve suffering in troubled lands. Summoned by the Earth tells the story of Cynthia’s spirited Earth Treasure Vase pilgrimages, many of these told in gripping detail as she encounters the joys and anguish of the world’s diverse cultures from war-stricken Liberia to the mystical standing stones in Avebury; from the outback of Aboriginal Australia to the nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and back to the cave in Nepal where it all began. In the process of bringing communities together to address their suffering and heal their lands, Cynthia is also forced to face what is calling to be healed within herself. When asked what is most needed to save our world, Cynthia’s teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, replied, “We need to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.” Hearing that sound and heeding its call, Cynthia, and eventually many others who have joined her, have borne witness to the web of life in all its beauty and sorrow, ultimately seeing how Gaia—Mother Earth—is inviting us all to become vessels of sacred activism, global healing, and collective awakening. Responding to this summons from the Earth is the most pressing opportunity of our times.

Uncovers the hidden world of the military legal system and the intimate history of racism that pervaded the armed forces long after integration. Richard A. Serrano reveals how racial discrimination in the US military criminal justice system determined whose lives mattered and deserved a second chance and whose did not. Between 1955 and 1961, a group of white and black condemned soldiers lived together on death row at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Although convicted of equally heinous crimes, all the white soldiers were eventually paroled and returned to their families, spared by high-ranking army officers, the military courts, sympathetic doctors, highly trained attorneys, the White House staff, or President Eisenhower himself. During the same 6-year period, only black soldiers were hanged. Some were cognitively challenged, others addicted to substances or mentally unbalanced—the same mitigating circumstances that had won white soldiers their death row reprieves. These men lacked the benefits of political connections, expert lawyers, or public support; only their mothers begged fruitlessly for their lives to be spared. By 1960, John Bennett was the youngest black inmate at Fort Leavenworth. His lost battle for clemency was fought between 2 vastly different presidential administrations—Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s—as the civil rights movement was gaining steam. Drawing on interviews, trial transcripts, and rarely published archival material, Serrano brings to life the characters in this lost history: from desperate mothers and disheartened appeals lawyers, to the prison doctors, psychiatrists, and chaplains. He shines a light on the scandalous legal maneuvering that reached the doors of the White House and the disparity in capital punishment that was cut so strictly along racial lines.

When magic strikes and Joe Jefferson is transformed from an ordinary schoolboy into a powerful warrior, his simple life is greatly altered as dangerous tasks to slay ogres, wrestle dragons, and confront villains are bestowed upon him by the residents of Muddle Earth who are in desperate need of a hero such as he.

Journey Prize winner Shashi Bhat’s "powerful, surprising and terrifying" (Rufi Thorpe) story about a high school student's traumatic experience and how it irrevocably alters her life, for fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Girlhood, and Pen15. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina spends her spare time reading Beowulf and flirting with an internet predator. She has a vicious crush on her English teacher, and her best friend Amy is slowly drifting away. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother tries to match her up with local Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, and Nina’s worried father has started reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. Beginning with a disturbing incident at her high school, The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the ‘90s to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret and discovers that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply affecting, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

Gaia, in which James Lovelock puts forward his inspirational and controversial idea that the Earth functions as a single organism, with life influencing planetary processes to form a self-regulating system aiding its own survival, is now a classic work that continues to provoke heated scientific debate.

The sixteenth of the twenty-five major works of Guillevic published by Gallimard since 1942, Summoned (Requis) represents a pivotal moment in his oeuvre and reaffirms his position as an essential and compelling voice in contemporary poetry. A long poem composed of short, lapidary verse that the poet calls quanta, each in itself a miniature poem, Requis distils familiar themes and motifs of the Guillevician universe within an expanded vision encompassing the outer reaches of space. Within this poetic hurly burly at once totalising and fragmented, arboreal and rhizomatic, cadenced and discontinuous, expansive and condensed, there is a summons to bear witness to the human condition while heeding the injunction of ‘notre toucher/De l’illimité’ that seeks to transgress the boundaries of knowledge, to abolish the dichotomies of presence and absence, motion and stillness, word and silence.