In the words of Mehmet Oz, MD: “An Arrow Through the Heart is an epiphany for women who mistakenly believe that they are immune from the ravages of heart disease. Using her heart as a magnifying glass, Deborah Daw Heffernan provides readers with a window into their souls.” This groundbreaking memoir was first mentioned on Oprah Winfrey’s life-saving 2002 show announcing cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of death among young women. That tragic fact is still true. With both depth and humor, Deborah Daw Heffernan recounts her first year of recovery from the massive heart attack that ambushed her in a gentle yoga class—during the prime of her life and despite her impeccable health history. Ranging from high-stakes action in the OR at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to quietly unfolding seasons on a lake in Maine, An Arrow Through the Heart is a moving and informative story of what it takes to find one’s own path to true healing. Ultimately, Heffernan combines allopathic and complementary medicine to create a sensible recovery strategy for our times. She touchingly describes her husband’s devotion and the toll that her cardiovascular disease takes on him, as well as how he, too, grew from the experience. Weaving their story with the lives of family and friends, Heffernan demonstrates how illness can be transformative for all involved. Not only an empowering companion for cardiac patients, this medical classic is a guide to recovery from catastrophic change of any kind. Above all, it is a powerful testament to the unexpected joy that can come from leading a life of acknowledged impermanence. Updates include cardiovascular data for today’s reader, links to the author’s website and other resources, a new section on SCAD (spontaneous coronary artery dissection), and— spoiler alert—a heart transplant in 2006. All author’s proceeds are donated to cardiac causes. Deborah Daw Heffernan is a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Universities. She has worked as a teacher in Switzerland, an associate dean at Boston University, and a freelance writer. For fourteen years she was vice president of a leading Boston-based corporate training/consulting firm—until a near-fatal heart attack changed her life forever. She lives with her husband, Jack, on a small lake in Maine.

Arrow to the Heart is the fascinating story of how Christopher Kortlander, the owner of the private town of Garryowen, Montana, fought off the federal government and exposed a vast conspiracy of corruption and espionage. In the spring of 2005 a federally orchestrated raid took place at the small Montana town of Garryowen. Christopher Kortlander, the private owner of Garryowen and the focus of the raid, was suspected of selling valuable historical artifacts with false provenance. Kortlander vigorously fought this criminal allegation and eventually revealed a vast conspiracy of government corruption and espionage. He also exposed stunning connections between his raid, the Gibson Guitar raid, and a raid in rural Utah that led to the deaths of multiple people.

* WINNER of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work * Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple—“an American novel of permanent importance” (San Francisco Chronicle)—crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving. Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she’s urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us and brings her legendary free verse to the page once again, demonstrating that she remains a revolutionary poet and an inspiration to generations of fans.

A translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is the most widely known and widely recited scripture in Mahayana Buddhism. This exciting, trail-blazing, non-traditional commentary takes the reader right into the emptiness of all experience through a delightfully irreverent combination of wit, irony, prose and poetry. In the words of Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs, "Written in a voice that is neither pious nor academic, hectoring nor detached, An Arrow to the Heart is a fine example of the new wave in contemporary Buddhist writing. In its quietly relentless way, this pithy and unorthodox commentary to the Heart Sutra leaves you with nowhere to stand but right here." In addition to McLeod's revised translation of the Heart Sutra, and a line-by-line commentary on this enigmatic scripture, this second edition contains a new introduction by Peter Clothier, an internationally-known writer who writes about art and artists.The Heart Sutra is about the perfection wisdom-an experiential understanding of life that goes beyond the conceptual or the intellectual. In contrast to most commentaries, McLeod offers an experiential journey, a dance of words, ideas, images, quotations, and stories that opens the reader to the experience to which the sutra is pointing. As Peter Clothier says in his introduction, "Frequently the reader falls into a complete and unexpected stillness to dwell on a revealing line or a quotation, before being swept off again into a new direction."One reader of the first edition described it in these words, "What I love most about it is that it's not even a book, really - more the literary equivalent of yellowcake uranium, meant to blow the mind open to ultimate reality. This is book as verb, not noun - book as instigator of awareness."And, "This is a book to ingest in nonlinear fashion. Pull it off the shelf, open to any page, read a few lines, pause, breathe, and allow concepts to collapse. It's a direct hit of reality, as bracing as a plunge into a glacial lake."

Before You Die, Live the Life You Were Born To Live. When you come to the end of your days, you will not measure your life based on success and failures. All of those will eventually blur together into a single memory called “life.” What will give you solace is a life with nothing left undone. One that’s been lived with relentless ambition, a heart on fire, and with no regrets. On the other hand, what will haunt you until your final breath is who you could have been but never became and what you could have done but never did. The Last Arrow is your roadmap to a life that defies odds and alters destinies. Discover the attributes of those who break the gravitational pull of mediocrity as cultural pioneer and thought leader Erwin McManus examines the characteristics of individuals who risked everything for a life they could only imagine. Imagine living the life you were convinced was only a dream. We all begin this life with a quiver full of arrows. Now the choice is yours. Will you cling to your arrows or risk them all, opting to live until you have nothing left to give? Time is short. Pick up The Last Arrow and begin the greatest quest of your life.

"A lyrical and magical novel about two teens who fall in love despite their families being caught in a bitter rivalry"--