In Waking Up In Asia, Kim M. Hood shares stories of both conflict and success with boldness, but does it in a poignant way. A military veteran whose life started from small town southern beginnings, to being forced to move up north because of divorced parents as a pre-teen, and thrust back down south after years of teenage angst. Compartmentalized bumps and bruises didn't stop the fulfillment of all high school goals, with a well respected U.S. Army career and Postal Job which followed, making everything in life easy and obtainable, that was until the unthinkable happened. Even people who don't go looking for trouble can have it find a way to their doorstep. It found Kim's. She traverses settings easily, so the readers feel and understand the why then and what now.

"Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers." –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A globalized version of The Great Gatsby . . . [Hamid's] book is nearly that good." –Alan Cheuse, NPR "Marvelous and moving." –TIME Magazine From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, the boldly imagined tale of a poor boy’s quest for wealth and love His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation—and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

"Sometimes I feel like crying, but the tears just don't come...." "I had no idea there was a state of mind like this. Everything turned black...." "It was a zombie place where I just couldn't be a part of anything...." These are the words of survivors who have lived through one of the most insidious conditions of our time: the desire to die. Five million Americans have attempted suicide. Every seventeen minutes, one of them succeeds. And the numbers continue to grow. Through fifty startling interviews with suicide survivors of all ages and backgrounds, psychologist Richard A. Heckler takes us into the very heart of despair, documenting the varied paths that lead to that crucial place where one's world seems to stretch, tear, and then break apart. In these intimate accounts we begin to understand the determination and clarity of that fatal choice. But after the failed attempt, healing is possible. For the first time, with great care and penetrating insight, Heckler traces the heroic patterns of recovery. By offering clear, profound portraits of hope, this extraordinary and unprecedented book attests to the resilience of the human spirit, by bearing witness to those who stood at death's door, and found the courage to live. "It's hard to imagine a hopeful or inspiring book on suicide until you begin reading the astonishing Waking Up, Alive." --San Francisco Chronicle "In this sensitive book, Richard Heckler brings compassionate light to a shadowy corner of our psyche." --Ram Dass Author of Journey of Awakening "These moving accounts, written with a great heart of compassion, have a deeply healing effect on the ocean of human tears. This is a wise andultimately life-affirming work!" --Jack Kornfield, Ph.D. Author of A Path With Heart

Waking Up Together is written for those who want to journey to new depths of intimacy, both spiritually and in their love relationship. The book shows how a committed, long-term relationship can enhance spiritual development and how relationships can be transformed by spiritual practice. Written by two Zen teachers married for thirty-seven years, it shows that relationships and all that arise from them can be a help--not a hindrance!--as we seek greater freedom and joy. It is possible to wake up together! Going far beyond merely recommending skills and strategies to improve relationships, Waking Up Together serves as a guide in our ongoing process of spiritual discovery and intimacy. Throughout the book the authors intermingle stories and poems along with anecdotes from their married life, empowering couples to awaken to an ever-expanding experience of relationship that is full of spontaneity, mystery, awe, love, and unlimited possibility. Waking Up Together will be useful for couples of all persuasions. It affirms and encourages couples to cultivate the richness of their own relationship, and open to the unbounded potential of love.

The Once and Future Hegemon In a world bristling with dangers, only one enemy poses a truly mortal challenge to the United States and the peaceful and prosperous world that America guarantees. That enemy is China, a country -that invented totalitarianism thousands of years ago -whose economic power rivals our own -that believes its superior race and culture give it the right to universal deference -that teaches its people to hate America for standing in the way of achieving its narcissistic “dream” of world domination -that believes in its manifest destiny to usher in the World of Great Harmony -which publishes maps showing the exact extent of the nuclear destruction it could rain down on the United States Steven Mosher exposes the resurgent aspirations of the would-be hegemon—and the roots of China’s will to domination in its five-thousand-year history of ruthless conquest and assimilation of other nations, brutal repression of its own people, and belligerence toward any civilization that challenges its claim to superiority. The naïve idealism of our “China hands” has lulled America into a fool’s dream of “engagement” with the People’s Republic of China and its “peaceful evolution” toward democracy and freedom. Wishful thinking, says Mosher, has blinded us to the danger we face and left the world vulnerable to China’s overweening ambitions. Mosher knows China as few Westerners do. Having exposed as a visiting graduate student the monstrous practice of forced abortions, he became the target of the regime’s crushing retaliation. His encyclopedic grasp of China’s history and its present-day politics, his astute insights, and his bracing realism are the perfect antidote for our dangerous confusion about the Bully of Asia.

“I was twenty-three and I had set off for Asia to become a writer, intrigued by lurid tales of booms, busts, drugs, sex, violence, magic. There was a wicked sorcery in Asia, in the economic profligacy of the early nineties, in the way financiers and businessmen took a rapidly wiring and developing continent and looted billions, like a titanic parlor trick converting all that wealth into abandoned office complexes and half-completed shopping malls. . . . I wanted it all—the money, the sex, the drugs. And to this day I believe that if I am honest with myself, despite all I have learned the hard way over the past decade, I would still want it all again, the fucking and the getting loaded and the scheming to get enough money to pay for that life.” In the late 1980s, not long out of college, Karl Taro Greenfeld found himself stranded in New York, a failed writer before his career had even begun. His Jewish-American father angrily cut off support; his Japanese mother suggested he go to Japan to teach English. He did, accepting a job with no more promise than he’d had before. But he stayed in Asia for the next several years, working his way through a series of journalistic posts, watching a culture erupt before his eyes and facing his own demons. Through a series of vividly imagistic stories that range from the rigidly journalistic to the deeply intimate, Standard Deviations recounts Greenfeld’s experiences—both professional and personal—during Asia’s wild ride at the end of the twentieth century. Whether drinking Japanese cough syrup to get high with other Western expatriates, visiting a free-sex ashram in Bombay, or watching a former high school pal self-destruct as an equity analyst in Jakarta, Greenfeld evokes the spirit of a continent in flux at an explosive “bubble” economy’s end—and a man confronting his own identity and aspirations. Raunchy, insightful, eloquent and moving, Standard Deviations is an uncompromising work of cultural observation and self-exploration.

Contrary to the prevailing view in the West that the 500-year dominance of Western civilization points to it being the only universal civilization. Can Asians Think? argues that other civilizations may yet make equal contributions to the development and growth of mankind. Hailed as “an Asian Toynbee” and “the Max Weber of the new Confucian ethic”, Mahbubani continues to illuminate his central arguments with new essays in this fourth edition.