The story of the Buddha and his awakening is more than an account of the birth of a religious tradition: it is also one of the great archetypal tales of... the spiritual quest, colorful in its many details and thrilling in its depiction of the world transformed by an enlightened human being. Sherab Chödzin Kohn’s retelling of the Buddha’s life is both readable and historically informed, and presents the Buddha’s teachings along with the events of his past lives to final nirvana. Library Journal called it “a splendid combination of biography and instruction.” This new edition of the book previously entitled The Awakened One has been updated to include a short history of Buddhism as well as a selection of resources for further reading.

In seeking to submit her will completely to God, Catherine of Siena practiced extreme self-sacrifice fueled by prayer so intense that she often lost... awareness of the world around her. She expressed these experiences in numerous letters and writings that address the turbulent times of 14th-century Italy in which she lived. For her teaching she was one of the first women named as Doctor of the Church. Sold individually or as a part of The Upper Room Spiritual Classics®, Series 3.

It's not what I lost. It's what I've found. I was only seventeen, just a girl, when God asked me for everything I had ... my health, my hopes, my... independence, my dreams, my freedom, and my mobility. He took it all. I was so angry with Him that I tried to push Him away. God relentlessly held me more closely. Looking back, forty years later, I understand that God has changed and healed me---my heart and my mind---in the most unexpected ways, giving me rubies of His wisdom about an unbending faith and an experience of His mercy I can now tell you about. Was it a fair exchange, my freedom and no wheelchair for the rubies of wisdom I've been given? Absolutely. In this I have learned at the feet of the Lord Jesus, embracing the way that God heals us, even when we rage at Him in anger, fear, and despair. This book is not about what I lost in that diving accident so long ago. It's about the wisdom He's given me to live life victoriously in the face of disappointments and challenges that we all face.

This is a translation of one of the very few Russian serfs' memoirs. Savva Purlevskii recollects his life in Russian serfdom and the lives of his... grandparents, parents, and fellow villagers. He describes family communal life and the serfs' daily interaction with landlords and authorities. Purlevskii came from an initially prosperous family that later became impoverished. Early in his childhood, he lost his father. Purlevskii did not have a chance to gain a formal education. He lived under serfdom until 1831 when at the age of 30, he escaped his servitude.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched... groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen. With shades of Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and The Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour de force debut—a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.

Last night while I lay thinking here Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear And pranced and partied all night long And sang their same old Whatif... song:Whatif I flunk that test?Whatif green hair grows on my chest?Whatif nobody likes me?Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?...To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic is now available in a special edition containing the classic hardcover book and a CD of highlights from his Grammy Award-winning album.Here in the attic of Shel Silverstein you will find Backward Bill, Sour Face Ann, the Meehoo with an Exactlywatt, and the Polar Bear in the Frigidaire. You will talk with Broiled Face, and find out what happens when Somebody steals your knees, you get caught by the Quick-Digesting Gink, a Mountain snores, and They Put a Brassiere on the Camel.From the creator of the beloved poetry collections Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up, here is another wondrous book of poems and drawings.

Every company relies on talent to succeed, but none so much as professional service firms. Within this rapidly expanding, trillion-dollar sector, people... are more than "valuable assets"; they are the source of competitive advantage. Indeed, success is determined more by the people these firms pay than by the people who pay them. What separates the best professional firms from their less-successful competitors? And what lessons do their experiences hold for other talent-driven businesses?In this comprehensive book, respected academic Jay W. Lorsch and accomplished practitioner Thomas J. Tierney draw from rigorous research and decades of experience to provide a practical perspective on how to win in professional services. Their work is based on an analysis of industry leaders in fields as diverse as law, accounting, investment banking, advertising, information technology, executive search, and management consulting. "Aligning the Stars" argues that strategic success is achieved by building an organization of executive-level stars whose day-to-day performance reinforces and ultimately achieves the goals of the business. Outstanding firms align stars across business lines, geographies, and even generations.Through compelling real-world examples, Lorsch and Tierney show how successful firms create and sustain alignment via: Strategy - determining which elements of strategy are most important and why - and how effective implementation incorporates organizational realities; People Systems - converting talent into stars, while nurturing "firm first" behaviors; Structure and Governance - organizing around partnership principles - even in a corporate environment; Culture - actively managing the culture to guide - and control-individual behavior; Leadership - exercising effective leadership when the power to control "partner-peers" is limited; and, Careers - aligning individual stars by helping professionals build a life, not just a resume.By showing how to integrate strategy, organization, and the needs of individual stars, this book offers valuable lessons for the current and future leaders of every talent-driven business. Jay W. Lorsch is the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School. Thomas J.Tierney is the former Chief Executive of Bain & Company, and currently serves as Chairman of The Bridgespan Group, Bain's nonprofit affiliate.

This is our THIRD school improvement plan! Why aren t we seeing any results? We have all of this data, but we don t know what to do with it! What does... this workshop have to do with the goals we set for our school? Many of today s school leaders have all the latest tools, techniques, and programs for school improvement. Unfortunately, some leaders fail to create real, sustainable results for their schools because they use one or two flavor-of-the-month strategies without connecting all the pieces together for real improvement. In Align the Design: A Blueprint for School Improvement, Nancy J. Mooney and Ann T. Mausbach emphasize the importance of coordinating essential school improvement processes to increase staff capacity, improve student achievement, and develop effective schools. The authors show school leaders how to use power tools to Develop effective curriculum Make the most of their school s data Create successful school improvement plans Implement valuable professional development sessions and workshops Use efficient supervisory techniques Foster leadership for school improvement Each chapter includes personal reflections from the authors and lists of touchstone texts that have inspired their efforts. At a time when school leaders are trying to translate urgent calls for higher achievement into actions that work, Align the Design provides expert guidance and practical tools that will help educators work more purposefully together to create better schools for their students.

This compilation of all 4 of The Complete Guitar Player Songbooks contains over 180 songs written by such great songwriters as Lennon & McCartney,... Paul Simon, John Denver, Bob Dylan, and many more. In standard notation, with chord boxes and full lyrics.

A Lily Among the Thorns gives Christians a new way of thinking about sexuality. Author Miguel De La Torre, a well-respected ethicist and professor known... for his innovative readings of Christian doctrine, rejects both the liberal and conservative prejudices about sex. He instead develops an ethic that is liberative yet grounded soundly in the Bible; a sexuality that celebrates God’s gift of great sex by fostering intimacy, vulnerability and openness between loving partners.In A Lily Among the Thorns, De La Torre examines the Bible, current events, history and our culture-at-large to show how and why racism, sexism, and classism have distorted Christianity’s central teachings about sexuality. The author shows how the church’s traditionally negative attitudes toward sex in general—and toward women, people of color, and gays in particular—have made it difficult, if not impossible, to create a biblically based and just sexual ethic. But when the Bible is read from the viewpoint of those who have been marginalized in our society, preconceived notions about Christianity and sex get turned on their heads. Taking on hot-button topics such as pornography, homosexuality, prostitution, and celibacy, the author examines how “reading from the margins” provides a liberating approach to dealing with issues of sexuality.

Alimentum writers and poets capture food's elusive character (it's not just about what's on your plate); literature that dishes up life's events, big... and small, sweet and salty. These are well seasoned stories, essays and poems making feasts of our daily bread. For readers who savor flavors, sip wine, moon over farmer's markets, root through grocery stores, love their kitchens, and relish the restaurant experience and want to go beyond the recipe to the artist's interpretation; to the literary depths of food.

Everyone wants to define the man who signed his name “A. Lincoln.” In his lifetime and ever since, friend and foe have taken it upon themselves to... characterize Lincoln according to their own label or libel. In this magnificent book, Ronald C. White, Jr., offers a fresh and compelling definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity–what today’s commentators would call “authenticity”–whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life.Through meticulous research of the newly completed Lincoln Legal Papers, as well as of recently discovered letters and photographs, White provides a portrait of Lincoln’s personal, political, and moral evolution. White shows us Lincoln as a man who would leave a trail of thoughts in his wake, jotting ideas on scraps of paper and filing them in his top hat or the bottom drawer of his desk; a country lawyer who asked questions in order to figure out his own thinking on an issue, as much as to argue the case; a hands-on commander in chief who, as soldiers and sailors watched in amazement, commandeered a boat and ordered an attack on Confederate shore batteries at the tip of the Virginia peninsula; a man who struggled with the immorality of slavery and as president acted publicly and privately to outlaw it forever; and finally, a president involved in a religious odyssey who wrote, for his own eyes only, a profound meditation on “the will of God” in the Civil War that would become the basis of his finest address.Most enlightening, the Abraham Lincoln who comes into focus in this stellar narrative is a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, unafraid to “think anew and act anew.” A transcendent, sweeping, passionately written biography that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of its subject, A. Lincoln will engage a whole new generation of Americans. It is poised to shed a profound light on our greatest president just as America commemorates the bicentennial of his birth.From the Hardcover edition.

The Bastien Piano Basics method is comprised of five completely correlated course books — PIANO, THEORY, PERFORMANCE, TECHNIC, and A LINE A DAY SIGHT... READING. Bastien Piano Basics uses a gradual multi-key approach, with reading beginning in the C five-finger position. Five levels of carefully graded lesson material provide constant opportunities for reinforcing basic concepts. It's the smoothest, most heart-warming, most entertaining, most musical way to teach eager youngsters the joys of playing the piano. And comprehensive, page-by-page correlation makes Bastien Piano Basics remarkably easy to teach!

The Bastien Piano Basics method is comprised of five completely correlated course books — PIANO, THEORY, PERFORMANCE, TECHNIC, and A LINE A DAY SIGHT... READING. Bastien Piano Basics uses a gradual multi-key approach, with reading beginning in the C five-finger position. Five levels of carefully graded lesson material provide constant opportunities for reinforcing basic concepts. It's the smoothest, most heart-warming, most entertaining, most musical way to teach eager youngsters the joys of playing the piano. And comprehensive, page-by-page correlation makes Bastien Piano Basics remarkably easy to teach!