Kahlil Gibran’s great poem The Prophet is known and loved by people around the world, as an inspirational guide to everyday life it has become a source of strength to millions. The Eye of the Prophet draws from Gibran’s prose, poetry and letters to provide an illuminating selection of Gibran’s reflections that enlighten and help at times of stress.

As in his other books the author blends Christian, Muslim and Buddhist ideas into a spiritual unity that will transcend all cultural and religious divisions. Ranging with sublime imagery over the great themes that preoccupied Gibran throughout his life, it reveals new insights into the profound originality of his inspiration and throws fresh light on the mystical meaning of his message to the world. His is a lyrical poetic voice that embraces both Western and Eastern philosophy, expressing the spiritual uniqueness of his thoughts with eloquence and wisdom.

The Eye of the Prophet is a treasury of wisdom, of lyrical joy, of comfort and hope. Above all, it makes the perfect companion to The Prophet.

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This inspiring book presents in their clearest form the basic teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for both Eastern and Western seekers after enlightenment. As Andrew Harvey writes in his foreword, we have here “Buddhism purified to its simplest human essence, an essence that transcends all barriers, all colours and creeds”.

The first part of the book, adapted from oral teachings, introduces a series of 37 practices for the cultivation of bodhichitta, ‘the mind of awakening’, explaining what it means to set out to attain enlightenment on behalf of all sentient beings. The second part shows how these teachings can be applied, and describes how some of the greatest mystics have expressed their knowledge of the nature of reality.

An indispensable guide for all who seek to follow the path of truth, Essential Teachings brings ancient texts to life in contemporary situations and gives a brilliant insight into the mind of a wonderful man who has spent his life preaching a philosophy of peace and compassion against a background of violence and tragedy.

“The homely warmth and spiritual challenge that we have come to associate with the Dalai Lama… There is much wisdom there.”
John McConnell, ‘The Friend’

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More spiritual guidance from the Dalai Lama:
Beyond Dogma

“I maintain the conviction that human nature is basically affectionate and good. If our behaviour follows our kind and loving nature, then, quite naturally, immense benefits will result, not only for oneself but also for the society to which we belong. I generally qualify this love and affection as a universal religion. Everyone needs it, believers as much as non-believers. This attitude constitutes the very basis of morality.”

This unique and important book records the visions and beliefs of one of the greatest men of our time. In a series of wide-ranging discussions he speaks freely on matters affecting the entire world and all the individuals who inhabit it, revealing his profound wisdom and enlightened sense of responsibility as he talks knowledgeably about issues as diverse as birth control, the role of the media and the nature of compassion.

All those seeking to make sense of our troubled world will find new insights in the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on our current social problems, the repercussions of the spiritual domain in the political and social arena, the points of contact among the world’s religions, the concept of individual responsibility and the idea of interdependence in science and the environment. He talks simply but movingly about the path to world peace and the future of the planet, seeking to show that true enlightenment can come only from within each one of us.

Recorded during a visit to the West when the Dalai Lama met people from all walks of life, this wonderful book makes an outstanding contribution to mutual understanding among people of all races and creeds.

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More spiritual guidance from the Dalai Lama:
Essential Teachings

“An hilarious guide to bluffing your way to fat cattery… If that isn’t sound advice, we don’t know what is.” – ‘Mail on Sunday’

Different people have different goals in life. Some just want to be happy, some to be famous, some want excitement and danger, some want to serve mankind, and others want to be seriously rich. If you are in the last group this book is for you.

You may not have the managerial and leadership skills needed to manage a major business successfully but that need not stop you.

If you manage your career with one aim in mind – to become very wealthy indeed – then failure to create shareholder value need not stand in your way. Even if lack of results leads in the end to losing your top job, the compensation package, a top hat pension and a clutch of non-executive directorships will keep you on the road to a very comfortable retirement.

Illustrated by John Jensen, this satirical guide to becoming a fat cat shows you step by step how it can be done – a humorous manual of one-upmanship in business, to be ignored at your peril!

“A book dedicated to the not always popular themes of greed… and good old-fashioned fat-cattery.”
‘The Sunday Times’

“Offering a short cut, outlining the entry route to the magic circle with a tongue in cheek, slimline guide.”
‘Daily Telegraph’

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Mothers and daughters have a relationship that in its intensity is unlike any other. Pauline Perry explores the love, grief and guilt that form the relationships between mothers and daughters. This is a book for all women; a moving, intelligent and understanding exploration of the bond daughters have with their mothers in their lives and that they continue to share even after their mother’s death.

The Womb in Which I Lay draws on the author’s painful experiences following the death of her own mother. The response to a television documentary made about her process of grief demonstrated the deep need many women have to understand the meaning of the mother-daughter bond, and the way in which loss can change that bond. In mourning the death of their mother many women have found her in a new way, funding a peace in their own feminine identity as never before.

Drawing on the movingly frank stories of ten remarkable and successful women to depict the triumph of love over guilt and grief within the relationship. It is also a story of how far women have come since the 1950s, as the first generation of women to be career-oriented and sexually free often found that the freedoms and opportunities they enjoyed but which had been denied to their mother’s generation could cause a major gulf in the relationship.

Pauline Perry is a leading educationalist, a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and has been a life beer since 1991 as the Baroness Perry of Southwark.

“Drawing on literature, the author’s own grief on the death of her mother, and conversations with successful career women, this book explores the love and guilt, the search for identity and growth, and that step beyond grief and mourning when the daughter re-finds the mother she has lost.”
‘Choice’

“The book is a beautiful record of what Pauline feels for her dead mother and for her daughter… this wonderful feeling that like Russian dolls, we’re all inside each other: inside us are our mothers, our grandmothers, our greatgrandmothers, all these generations of women who came before us, and there shall be a little bit of us in all the generations which come ahead.”
‘South West’

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Derrick Jensen describes his abusive childhood within the context of our abuse of the planet. This is an evocative memoir of growing up in an abusive home, a statement of environmental activism, a moving portrayal of his relationship with the natural world and a startlingly original work of philosophy challenging conventional wisdom and accepted opinion.

Jensen strives to save his own spirit, in a way that can also prevent the destruction of the planet. It is a story about hope and of finding your own voice to stand against the culture of denial. It describes the way in which our culture silences that it wishes to exploit – women, children, indigenous peoples, other species, our consciences and experiences: silence that is not only economic and social but also personal. It deals with Jensen’s own process of reconnection to humanity and the world around him. In the place of the destructiveness of the dominant culture Jensen offers alternatives that are human, humane and sane.

“Jensen’s book accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader’s heart.”
‘Publisher’s Weekly’

“(This is) what Franz Kafka said a book should be – an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
Daniel Quinn, author of ‘Ishmael’

Currently Unavailable

How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilisation.

In 1980, an entire body of Jewish literature – the physical remnant of Yiddish culture – was on the verge of extinction. Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of Jewish immigrants to their non-Yiddish speaking children only to be discarded or destroyed. A twenty-three-year-old student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late.

Outwitting History is an adventure tale filled with unforgettable characters and told with the exhuberence of a man whose passion led him from house to house, country to country, collecting treasured books and heartfelt, often hilarious stories of the vibrant intellectual world these older Jews inhabited. Lansky and a team of young volunteers shlepped books from various attics and basements, demolition sites and dumpsters, while schmoozing with their owners, who insisted on feeding them a little nosh – gefilte fish, kasha, blintzes, latkes, kigel – before handing over, one book at a time, their beloved literary heritage.

When Lansky started out, experts believed that fewer than 70,000 Yiddish-language books still existed, he has now saved over 1.5 million books. As he takes us along on his groundbreaking journey, Lansky explores the roots of the Yiddish language and introduces us to the brilliant Yiddish writers – from Mendele to Sholem Aleichem to Issac Bashevis Singer – whose lasting cultural relevance is evident on every page.

Aaron Lansky shares the humour, tenacity and love for the written word that unites Jewish immigrants with everyone who cares about the future of great literature. And he enables us to see how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future.

“But now and again a quite unexpected book draws me in. The latest to trap me is ‘Outwitting History’ by Aaron Lansky… The book is the story of how he travelled the country saving a vast and rich culture which was about to be swallowed up… His visit to a Borscht belt hotel in the Catskills is worth the price alone. It’s very funny, very rewarding, and you don’t need to be Jewish to enjoy it.”
Simon Hoggart, ‘The Guardian’

“Outwitting History is the charming and compelling epic about how Lansky and a few volunteers saved Yiddish books from extinction. Lansky recounts his adventures on the road… Outwitting History inspires longing for an era that valued books over bookshelf space.”
‘The Times’

“There’s just one word to describe the feat at the heart of Aaron Lansky’s enchanting book Outwitting History… chutzpah… His account of saving 1.5 million books (and counting) is an adventure story to delight bibliophiles.”
‘Daily Mail’

“Aaron Lansky’s book is an adventure story about the survival of Yiddish… fast-moving, funny account of his 25-year mission… a very exciting read… Lansky, horrified that the People of the Book are discarding theirs, becomes a missionary for a lost culture… A whistle-stop journey to the end of the Jewish world.”
‘The Independent’

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“The first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war.” – New York Times

In 1936 two young photographers who had escaped from the Nazis to Paris re-invented themselves, and in doing so created the myth of the war photographer. Andre Friedmann took the name of Robert Capa while Gerta Pohorylle became Gerda Taro, and they began to photograph the Spanish Civil War together (the photos being credited to “Robert Capa”). Capa would become the most acclaimed war photographer of the twentieth century, but within a year Gerda Taro (his lover, manager and muse) would be killed while photographing the battle of Brunete.

Gerda Taro was the first female photojournalist known to have covered a war from the frontline, and was the first to die in battle. In recent years Gerda Taro has been rediscovered as a significant feminist figure, as well as a remarkable photographer in her own right. A selection of her photos from the Spanish Civil War illustrate this book.

This is the first English-language biography of one of the most extraordinary women of the twentieth century, an émigré who resisted the Nazis and a photographer who believed that her art would serve to free the people she photographed. Her own life was an assertion of liberty – political, sexual and personal – that would be taken on by women in the generation after her. In Out of the Shadows François Maspero creates a personal portrait of Taro, while capturing the personality and romanticism that fascinated her generation.

François Maspero is one of France’s major literary figures. Variously a bookseller, editor and publisher, he is also a novelist and the translator into French of writers ranging from Gabriel Garcia Marquesz to Arturo Perez-Reverte. As a teenager he fought in the French Resistance, and as a publisher he brought out the work of Franz Fanon, Che Guevara and Louis Althusser.

“Known, if at all, as the first female photojournalist killed in action (aged 26, at Brunete, in the Spanish Civil War), the German-Jewish Taro had a talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Included in this habit was her relationship with Robert Capa… Francois Maspero… sets this history straight.”
‘Independent on Sunday’

“Maspero is at his best when placing Taro in context of place and time, in characterising her as a free spirit, achingly glamorous in the midst of the dust and detritus of war. It is in the details that his book succeeds.”
‘Jewish Quarterly’

“Deeply personal portrait… Now she is out of the shadow of her famous lover her images show not only the devastation of the Spanish Civil War but what a formidable talent was lost to that war.”
‘Jewish Renaissance’

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“A wonderful memoir… It belongs on that small shelf of books which bear witness and, by doing so, become part of the literature of our times.” – Brian Moore

Farewell, Babylon is a memoir of a lost world, Baghdad, the magical city in which Iraq’s Kurds, Bedouins, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in a rough sort of harmony. The Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500 years to Biblical Babylon, but by Kattan’s childhood in the 1940’s anti-semitism was on the rise and Nazi-sympathisers were threatening Baghdad’s Jewish community.

Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of Baghdad’s then-teeming Jewish community. His Baghdad is a hot, quarrelsome city beset in equal parts by fear and desire. Its politics are frantic, its street life a mystery. Kattan evokes the colonial, Muslim-dominated society of his childhood and leaves an unforgettable portrait of Baghdad’s exoticism, and the political forces that shape it today.

Naim Kattan was born in Baghdad in 1928 and has published over 30 books. He has been awarded numerous international honours, including France’s Legion d’Honneur.

“Iraq’s most distinguished Jewish writer-in-exile… The plight of Jewry is recorded in Farewell, Babylon in spare, elegiac tones… A vital book.”
‘Sunday Times’

“Naim Kattan… tells of the last years in Baghdad, when Jews awaited the possibility – and the permits – to leave Iraq… also gives a poignant account of a young man seeking insight into the mysteries – and joys – of life in an inhibitory society.”
‘The Independent’

“Kattan… brings a first-hand immediacy to his Baghdad memoir which marks it out as a minor masterpiece of the genre… Shot through with an artless ardour which lingers long in the reader’s mind.”
‘Sunday Telegraph’

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“One of the very few books that there have ever been written about the lowest and the poorest, les miserables, by one of themselves. Her book contains the seldom-told truth which inspires in some compassion, in some revulsion, and in others revolution.” – ‘Horizon’

On its first publication in 1960, Beyond All Pity was a sensation and at the time was the bestselling Brazilian book in history making Carolina Maria de Jesus a spokeswoman for the poor, the dispossessed and the illiterate. This is a diary of her life in a Brazilian favela, the slums that are cities of crime and poverty, where she lived in a wooden shack roofed with flattened tin cans. She and her three children survived by foraging for waste paper and metal to sell and at night she wrote this diary on scraps of paper that made her internationally famous.

Beyond All Pity focussed attention on the plight of slum dwellers in Brazil’s favelas by its shocking description of the hungry and the poor in their daily struggle to survive. Carolina Maria de Jesus became one of the most famous figures in Brazil, and around the world, as millions identified with her strength of character and inspiring refusal to accept the world’s injustices.

Beyond All Pity is the unforgettable expression of an individual speaking against the evils of poverty and Carolina Maria de Jesus is an inspirational example of human endurance and courage under the most extreme suffering.

“One of the most astonishing documents of the lower depths ever printed.”
‘Newsweek’

“Beyond All Pity… remains a key document for understanding life on the origins of a society which continues to be among the most unequal in the world.”
‘Times Literary Supplement’

“A powerful voice for Brazil’s poor and exploited… compared in its social influence to works by Orwell and Zola.”
‘The Times’

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