In Beauty and the Soul, Ferrucci reveals how the overlooked power of everyday beauty can soothe the nagging difficulties of life. More than just a mere accessory, “beauty is a primary principle that touches all parts and functions of our being,” says Ferrucci. “It opens us to the world and brings harmony to our relation with others and to nature.”

Weaving research and case studies together with personal anecdotes and age-old parables that never fail to educate and enlighten, this provocative, accessible work explores the many ways that beauty can uplift, heal and transform—from the tangible to the intangible. For instance, Ferrucci illustrates how beauty can:

• Lengthen life: A Swedish study showed that those who go more often to the theater, movies, concerts and exhibitions have a greater chance of longevity.
• Facilitate healing: A study done in England moved all the staff and patients from an old but serviceable hospital to a new one which was designed to be both functional and beautiful. In the new hospital, the patients were shown to recover 21 percent faster, use fewer pain killers, and feel more satisfied.
• Provide us with a common ground: Beauty can encourage sharing between people, unite them and allow them to better know and enjoy one another.
• Transcend the “prison of the ego”: When we are experiencing awe and wonder, it’s nearly impossible to become ensnared by the hassles of our small, narrower world.

Beauty and the Soul challenges the way we perceive the world around us, guiding us to recognize and make use of the beauty present everywhere—in the environment, our relationships, our actions, words and inner selves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Piero Ferrucci is a psychotherapist and philosopher. A former student of and collaborator with the transpersonal psychologist Roberto Assagioli, Ferrucci is a staff member of the Psychosynthesis Institute of Florence, Italy, and the International Federation of Medical Psychotherapy. He lives in the Tuscan countryside with his wife and children.

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A New Design for Living is one of the most important works by Ernest Holmes, second only to his masterwork, The Science of Mind. This cherished title outlines a plan to redesign your life in order to achieve your goals. Holmes’s wisdom guides readers toward positive changes that can improve their personal life, career, physical health, and spiritual well-being.

Discover a Richer Life offers a blueprint to finding health, wealth, and a meaningful life through a relationship with nature and reality. Profound yet simple, the 20 focused essays address themes such as the connection between the mind and physical health, the development of security through faith, and the power of subconscious thought patterns to bringing about positive change.

Living Without Fear provides a guide to liberating yourself from fear while embracing a life of health, happiness, and abundance. The clear, direct essays address topics like how to eliminate superstitions, the power of embracing your individuality, and the importance of preparing yourself to accept prosperity, even before it arrives.

About Ernest Holmes: An internationally known authority on religious psychology and the founder of the Religious Science movement, his inspirational books include the beloved classic The Science of Mind, This Thing Called You, The Art of Life, and The Hidden Power of the Bible.

With e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, people today are more connected than ever. Yet when a friend gets divorced, loses a parent, or faces a tough transition, these modern tools come up short. In fact, the technologies that were created to bring us together have eroded our ability to connect in an authentic way.

In The Art of Comforting: What to Say and Do for People in Distress, Val Walker reminds us of the importance of making this connection and advises us how to be there for the people that need us  An experienced rehabilitation counselor, Walker consulted 13 top professionals who use comforting skills in their field every day. Their advice will help us comfort loved ones dealing with illness, divorce, death, and hardship. Yet, their tips can also help us support each other in every day situations, like bad days and break-ups. Learn….

• What to say and what not to say to those in distress
• Activities that provide comfort in times of trial
• How to identify and utilize your personal strengths to comfort
• What to write in a card when comforting someone
• Activities to help children deal with disappointment
• How to give bad news in a comforting way

Look for the book in stores October 28th, or pre-order online:

Review: I Am the Word by Paul Selig

I Am the Word might be better called I Am the Challenge.

From the get-go, Paul Selig’s channeled text challenges readers on multiple levels, and the stakes couldn’t be higher: mankind is on the verge of a great awakening—an evolution to the next level of understanding—and readers can tune into that and help make it happen if they open themselves up to a sense of possibility. In doing so, say Selig’s spirit guides, readers will achieve self-actualization and fulfillment.

That’s a tall order, but the book bills itself as “a guide to the consciousness of man’s self in a transitioning time.” It’s a how-to book for the spirit and the self.

Because self-actualization is, obviously, a highly personal experience, I can only speak to the book’s effect on me. Different readers will experience different results, particularly because they’ll approach the book with different expectations and different levels of open-mindedness.

And that is the book’s first challenge: readers have to approach it with an open mind.

“When a person says, ‘I intend to be different,’ one cannot be different without undergoing change and that change is not always comfortable, nor is it always graceful. Period,” the Guides say.

But the process of change, as outlined in the book, opens a reader to wonder, recognition, and knowing—and, in the end, it helps readers manifest themselves “as the energy of love.” That’s intimate—and for some people, uncomfortable—terrain to explore.

The book is also challenging because it’s dense. The text is readable, but the content is heavy and thoughtful, so it’s nothing a reader can skim through. (It’s not a beach read. I speak from experience!) I Am the Word requires concerted attention and reflection—but the payoffs, remember, are potentially huge.

The next challenge, for me, came when the book suggested a radical paradigm shift in my thinking about Christ. “We don’t talk about personage of Christ,” the Guides say in their initial discussion. “We talk about Christ as a creation of the God Self inhabiting man in its fullness.”

Jesus, the Guides say, “is a personage of the Christ, a manifestation of the Christ in fullness, and there are others as well who have ascended to this level or understanding and frequency.”

“To be the Christ,” they go on to say, “simply means to be yourself in full realization of your power as a piece of God in action.” To reach self-actualization, you achieve your “Christed self.”

“[O]nce you bypass the religion and you understand that the Christ is a consciousness, is a frequency, is an offering to man from the Creator to align to, then you begin to have a very different experience of understanding who you are,” the Guides say.

As a Catholic, lapsed as I might be right now, that was kind of a tough concept to wrap my head around—yet, leaving myself open to wonder, as the Guides suggest, I found that the ideas had certain resonance.

While the book is filled with ideas large and small, radical and familiar, comforting and jarring, it’s also an action manual. The Guides invite readers to do. After all, they say, the Word is God in action, and so they invite readers to take part in that action.

“This is the decree,” they say. “You are Word.”

Sometimes, the Guides invite readers to just allow things to happen—like, my frequency would align with the Christ frequency if I simply sat there and allowed it to. Sometimes, the Guides invite readers to repeat intentions:

“I am now choosing to think only those thoughts which will bring me peace and will align me to a high consciousness. I am doing this easily and through my own intention to know myself as Word. Word I am Word through this intention. Word I am word.”

“[An] intention,” the Guides say, “is a way to invoke and express and experience the light in a way that will be wonder-full for you, so that you can move into this as you are required.”

That remains an ongoing challenge throughout the book: being open to wonder so that things fall into place and frequencies align. At times, even Selig, serving as the medium, felt doubt or skepticism, which the Guides address as the channeling session are underway—and since the book is basically a transcript of those channeling sessions, the interactions between Selig and the Guides are included.

Rhetorically, those interactions prove to be useful devices because Selig’s uncertainty can mirror the reader’s, and so as the Guides take time to reassure Selig and explain things for him, the readers get the benefits of those teaching moments and can have their own doubts assuaged.

The Guides prove remarkably patient and remarkably optimistic. Trust them, they say, and everything will work out just fine. “[T]he opportunities you require to bring this growth into achievement will present themselves one day at a time,” the Guides assure—but only if you leave yourself open to the possibilities that they’ll happen.

Ultimately, the more open I was to experiencing what the book had to say—despite the ways it challenged me—the more I got out of the book. For instance, when the Guides would offer an affirmation and then say something like, “Many of you will feel this as a lightening around you” or “As you do this, you begin to experience heat in the heart center,” those things actually happened to me. Again, I can’t attest to the experience others will have—but those things happened to me.

I Am the Word has much to offer readers who are open to the experience. Most importantly, it seeks to help us all be better people and to see the world as a better place. It wants us to reconnect with wonder and with each other. Regardless of the vocabulary the book uses, or the spiritual approach it takes, its final vision is a beautiful one—and a challenge well worth rising to meet.

Book Review: The Fallen Sky – An Intimate History of Shooting Stars
by Christopher Cokinos

If you found yourself craning your neck toward the heavens of late looking for shooting stars – here’s a terrific book to read when you have finished your stint of sky watching.

Author Christopher Cokinos has pulled together a fabulous book on rocks from space, those collectibles from the cosmos. He tells the tale of the “love affair” between meteorites and individuals on the hunt for these specimens from space.

“Meteorites are, in fact, implicated in the seeding of life’s ingredients on Earth,” Cokinos writes. “And even the most indifferent know that these bits of former asteroids have rained devastation in the past and threaten to do so in the future.”

But what is so engaging about this book are the personal looks at explorers, professors, scientists and other characters that are passionate – and even fanatical – about meteorites. In this volume you’ll find yourself intrigued about private collectors of meteorites, as well as those who deal in hocking space stones.

Again, the author has woven together the science of meteorites and those on the chase for them – be it Daniel Barringer who popularized the idea that craters could be produced by meteorites to Harvey Nininger, noted collector and adventurer who opened the first meteorite museum.

The Fallen Sky is full of colorful characters, and generous helpings of mythology to scientific studies of the day. In writing the book, Cokinos takes the reader along on his travels from Kansas to Greenland and from Australia to the South Pole.

Once you’ve finished this book, your next shooting star observation will take on a new world of its own.

Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night
Gary Jansen

Born to working class parents, both the Catholic Church and Scooby Doo conspired to convince Gary Jansen there was no such thing as ghosts. The old Colonial house he grew up in told him a very different story, however. His mother knew the house was haunted, but only after Jansen and his wife moved back into the home years later did Jansen experience the presences himself. Eventually, he turned to Mary Ann Winkowski, the inspiration for The Ghost Whisperer, for help. Winkowski identified the misplaced spirits and taught Jansen how to help them on their way to the other side. In the process, Jansen reevaluated his concept of reality, his relationship to the Catholic Church, and his personal connection to all things spiritual.

The book he’s written about his journey through the other realms is a bit Norman Rockwell meets Agatha Christie during the Love, Sex, and Rock ‘n Roll years. He has given the reader profound spiritual concepts to think about in the context of a really good mystery story. I’ve communicated with discarnate spirits for decades, and most ghost stories don’t interest me, but I couldn’t read this one fast enough.

—Anna Jedrziewski, www.SpiritConnectionNewYork.org, New York, NY

Galley Talk: Week of 8/9/10
By Arlene Lynes, Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock, Ill.
Aug 09, 2010

I originally picked up Gary Jansen’s Holy Ghosts (Tarcher, Sept.) from the galley pile because of its subtitle: How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night. I was intrigued, but was pretty certain I’d just skim it. Was I ever wrong—I was hooked in the first chapter. Holy Ghosts is more than just a gripping true story about ghosts haunting his family’s home and how he got them to leave. I thoroughly enjoyed the fascinating history that Jansen, an editor at Doubleday Religion, incorporates into the story about the Catholic Church and its beliefs in spirits, angels, and demons. He also shares historical data about curses, other cultures’ beliefs about death, and what happens after we depart our bodies. His writing style is engaging and informative; I couldn’t stop reading. As soon as I was done, I shared it with someone who owns a haunted home. Her review was accurate and succinct: “It scared the shit out of me.”

Meteorite Hunters, Book Review: The Fallen Sky by Christopher Cokinos
by Jonathan DuHamel on Jul. 29, 2010, under General Science

The Fallen Sky is a richly detailed account of meteorite hunters and meteorites. The author’s narrative style is often lyrical and introspective, reminiscent of the style of Loren Eiseley.

The Fallen Sky is arranged into ten “books” tracing the adventures of meteorite hunters from the early 20th Century to the present, through which Cokinos weaves history, science, and a personal memoir. The book also has an introduction, prologue, and glossary.

In the Prologue, Cokinos describes melted cosmic dust found in meteorites (chondrules) as “stipples on creation’s body.” “You need not be a meteorite scientist or a meteorite collector to touch this body, for it reaches us every day, though in forms – dust and micrometeorites – too small to notice without fancy equipment.” You probably eat this cosmic dust with your lettuce. Upon seeing the flash of a meteor in the sky, “You can tell what the meteor’s made of by the color of its tail – red for silicon, yellow for iron, orange-yellow for sodium, bluish-green for magnesium, violet for calcium.”

The chronicles of meteorite hunters take us through North America, Australia, Europe, Greenland, and Antarctica.

Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona, figures in two of the stories. “Anyone intent on reaching that drab crinkle had to cross country shaped by paucity and violence: miserly rainfall…and mile-high air.” The first story concerns Daniel Barringer who sought what he thought would be a very large buried meteorite beneath the crater. He wanted to sell it to an iron-mining company. Meteor Crater figures again in the story of Harvey Nininger, perhaps America’s greatest hunter of meteorites. During his lifetime, he found nearly half of all meteorites found in the United States.

Book VII is “Passions of the Dealers.” Cokinos made several trips to Tucson’s Gem & Mineral show and visited with some of our local meteorite hunters, “quite simply, eccentrics.” Cokinos says that Robert Haag, The Meteorite Man, “has been the most influential meteorite dealer since Harvey Nininger,” and devotes several pages to Haag’s adventures. Another collector Cokinos describes is Geoff “Colonel Carbo” Notkin, who writes the Logical Lizard blog at the Tucson Citizen. Notkin wrote about The Fallen Sky: “The Fallen Sky may appear, on the surface, to be an exploration of the history of meteorites and meteorite hunters, but it is much more: a subtle journey through the author’s mind and memory on a quest for knowledge and understanding. While examining the lives of important and wildly eccentric figures in meteorite history—such as Ellis Hughes, an Oregon farmer who spent months absconding with the 15-ton Willamette iron meteorite in 1902—Christopher also shines the hard light of reason on his own life and motivations.” I agree with Notkin’s assessment of the book.

Book IX takes us to Australia to inspect large impact craters. There Cokinos discusses and speculates about the origin of life on earth and its possible connection to meteorite impacts. “Impact craters still deserve their reputations as scenes of devastation, but as they cool, they become ideal spots for life to re-emerge.”

To give you another peek at the flavor of the book, here are the first two paragraphs of the Introduction:

“On any clear night, under a dark enough sky, we can see shooting stars. We wish upon them, even if we don’t quite know what they are… and even if we don’t know where they come from or what they might tell us about the universe. It’s as if we’re eager to pin our chances on something strange and sudden, something beautiful beyond our ken. Across cultures and time, we have written ourselves into the sky. We create constellations, transforming the random spatter of stars into shapes and stories. We name planets after gods. And we associate meteors and meteorites… with the most elemental aspects of our lives: good luck, ill fortune, and even death.

Meteorites are, in fact, implicated in the seeding of life’s ingredients on Earth. And even the most indifferent know that these bits of former asteroids have rained devastation in the past and threaten to do so in the future. Meteorites are the alpha and omega of geology. These rocks – mere rocks – encompass the origins of life and the reality of death on our planet.”

The Fallen Sky is well worth reading. It should not, however, be read in a hurry. It should be savored, enjoyed, and contemplated.
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Some of his subjects include:

• The fame-seeking Robert Peary, who went in search of the North Pole and instead found the “ghost rocks of Greenland.”
• Daniel Moreau Barringer, a mining engineer, lawyer, businessman and “blowhard” who popularized the idea that craters could be created by meteorites.
• Biology professor Harvey Nininger, a rabid meteorite collector and adventurer who opened the first meteorite museum and pushed the science world into recognizing the study of meteorites.

Woven together with these tales of personal obsession and entanglement are fascinating details about how meteors have deepened our understanding of the planet and how we have come to understand them through the ages—from Aristotle’s belief that shooting stars were “streaks of light created by earthly vapors” to the ancient Chinese conviction that they were the “stool of the thunder gods.”

Just as shooting stars have captivated individuals and cultures over the centuries, The Fallen Sky—part science, part history and part memoir—is a rich, eye-opening exploration of meteorites and the passions of those who hunt them.

Read the book to prepare for the upcoming meteor shower! The Perseids, on August 12 and 13, is best viewed in the Northeast after midnight. From late night on Wednesday, August 11 till dawn on Thursday, August 12, a decent sprinkling of Perseid meteors may adorn this summer night, despite the moon. The Perseids tend to strengthen in number as midnight ebbs toward dawn. Although not a favorable year, these meteors are often bright and frequently leave persistent trains.

About the Author
The author of Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for an emerging writer in nonfiction, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. His nonfiction, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Orion, Science, and Poetry. He is a professor of English at Utah State University.

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Just in time for Halloween, Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night details Jansen’s quest to explain the phenomena in his home and put an end to the haunting. An honest and gripping account of this journey, the book chronicles his personal struggle to reconcile his Catholic faith with mounting evidence that his home was indeed occupied by spirits. As his investigation escalated, the ghosts forced Jansen to confront astonishing coincidences with local tragedies, painful memories from his childhood, and (with the help of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life inspiration for The Ghost Whisperer) the true identities of the spirits.

No ordinary ghost story, Holy Ghosts examines the relationship between religion and the paranormal, while considering perspectives on the afterlife from a variety of traditions.

Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night
Tarcher / Penguin hardcover, $22.95, September 16th

READ the introduction to Holy Ghosts.

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