Outstanding New Books Available in July

July 29, 2009

Don’t fret that summer seems to be quickly passing and no foreseeable opportunity for R&R exists. Instead, feed your inner desire for a fun, creative hobby, a spiritual journey, and a healthy lifestyle with these new titles for July. Whether you want to try a new recipe for a guest-pleasing dish, seek a peaceful meditation practice, or take a first step into the philosophy of alchemy, you will find that perfect book to top your summer reading list.

To order, please visit www.northatlanticbooks.com
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Isaac Newton and the Transmutation of Alchemy: An Alternative View of the Scientific Revolution
By Philip Ashley Fanning

newton

Isaac Newton was a dedicated alchemist, a fact usually obscured as unsuited to his stature as a leader of the scientific revolution. In Isaac Newton and the Transmutation of Alchemy, author Philip Ashley Fanning has diligently examined the evidence and concludes that the two major aspects of Newton’s research—conventional science and alchemy—were actually inseparable. Fanning reveals the surprisingly profound influence that Newton’s study of this hermetic art had in shaping his widely adopted scientific concepts. Alchemy was an ancient tradition of speculative philosophy that promised miraculous powers, such as the ability to change base metals into gold and the possibility of an elixir of life. Fanning compellingly describes this carefully tended esoteric institution, which may have found its greatest advocate in the career of the father of modern science. Relegated to the fringes of discourse until its twentieth-century revival by innovative thinkers such as psychiatrist Carl Jung, alchemy offers a key to understanding both the foundations of modern knowledge and important avenues in which we may yet discover wisdom.

$18.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-772-4
272 pages, 6 x 9

On sale July 7, 2009

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TAO of Letting Go: Meditation for Modern Living
By Bruce Frantzis

Tao of Letting Go

What is known from the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, and other Taoist texts is almost entirely literary. When Bruce Frantzis studied these texts with his main teacher, Grandmaster Liu Hung Chieh, he was taught their practical application: “This is what they say; this is what they mean; this is how to do them.” In The Tao of Letting Go, Frantzis offers a bridge to this pragmatic approach for living a spiritual life. Spirituality is not just an aspiration for which people strive, he says, but a genuine, accomplishable reality. Frantzis shows how to expend maximum effort and yet not use force—the gentle way of the Water method—to enrich personal health and energy systems. The author shows how to completely let go of the blockages that bind and prevent the seeker from reaching full spiritual potential. Short, direct chapters and exercises cover such topics as breathing and awareness; Taoist meditation; fog and depression; modern anxiety; love and compassion; and more.

$19.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-808-0
175 pages, 6 x 9

On sale July 7, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.

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The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness
By Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad

The Passionate Mind Revisited

The Passionate Mind Revisited takes readers on a liberating inner journey into the workings of their mind, transforming the way people look at themselves and the world. Expanding on Joel Kramer’s The Passionate Mind (1974), this book shows how the world’s life-threatening dramas are largely a function of people’s beliefs and experiences, and how humanity is on an evolutionary cusp requiring expanded awareness and conscious social evolution. In exploring what it is to be human, the book offers new vantage points on life’s core issues: the nature of thought, belief, fear, desire, love, relationships, freedom, meditation, violence, and evolution. By demonstrating how to inwardly see and break through one’s conditioning, Kramer and Alstad reveal deep aspects of the nature and processes of the mind, including how subjectivity materializes through different ways of filtering perception. The Passionate Mind Revisited also presents an evolutionary perspective on personal and global issues to help readers facilitate the shift to conscious social evolution.

$16.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-807-3
384 pages, 6 x 9

On sale July 14, 2009

Click HERE for the authors’ website.

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Wild Design: Ecofriendly Innovations Inspired by Nature
By Alan Marshall

Wild Design

In Wild Design, environmental designer and scientist Alan Marshall presents a manifesto on nature-inspired designs, including visionary concepts as well as exhibits of actual products, landscapes, and artwork from around the world. With elegant photographs and drawings, the book incorporates the ethos of sustainability by documenting many of the results of the Ecomimicry Project, an international experiment in ecodesign that marries the skills of local artists and ecologists from Western Australia and the Carpathian mountains in eastern Europe. All the designs treat nature as an inspiration for ecofriendly innovations. Among the fascinating possibilities:a bike helmet based on the crustacean exoskeleton, a heliotropic house, and a car fueled by algae. Marshall argues that design should be the responsibility of all, not just a technological elite, and it is in this spirit that he offers this timely, important book.

$18.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-790-8
168 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2

On sale July 14, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.

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Daily Kabbalah: Wisdom from the Tree of Life
By Gershon Winkler

Daily Kabbalah

From sorcery to animal totems, talking trees to magical stones, sacred circles to healing rituals, the Kabbalah brings readers a rich body of ancient wisdom that has been long neglected and even longer misunderstood. The Kabbalah celebrates a quality of consciousness that enables one to experience magic in the ordinary, miracles in the natural course of events, and spirituality in the physical. Its roots are as old and rich as most aboriginal shamanic traditions, sharing in common with many of them the belief that all of creation is alive. The uniqueness of Daily Kabbalah: Wisdom from the Tree of Life lies in its selections from this rare tradition of Jewish mystery wisdom. Culled from ancient and medieval Hebraic and Aramaic sources, much of this material has been hidden in dusty archives or obscure translations. These short selected readings are intended as contemplative, inspirational, and even entertaining extracts, accessible to readers of all backgrounds and spiritual paths.

$17.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-794-6
384 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2

On sale July 21, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.

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Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada
By David L. Spahr

Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms

This beautifully illustrated guidebook provides specific, easy-to-understand information on finding, collecting, identifying, and preparing the safer and more common edible and medicinal mushroom species of New England and Eastern Canada. Author David Spahr, a trained commercial photographer, here combines his mycological expertise and photographic skill to produce an attractive and detailed overview of his subject. Based on decades of practical experience and research, the book is written in a clear and forthright style that avoids the dry, generic descriptions of most field guides. Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada also provides useful ideas for cooking mushrooms. Rather than simply providing recipes, the book discusses the cooking characteristics of each variety, with advice about matching species with appropriate foods. Many mushrooms contain unique medicinal components for boosting the immune system to fight cancer, HIV, and other diseases, and Spahr offers practical and prudent guidelines for exploration of this rapidly emerging area of alternative therapeutic practice.

$19.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-795-3
248 pages, 7 x 9-1/4

On sale July 21, 2009

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Raw Family Signature Dishes: A Step-by-Step Guide to Essential Live-Food Recipes
By Victoria Boutenko

Raw Family

While the raw food diet is the fastest growing alternative approach to eating because of its health benefits, preparing raw food dishes is so new that many people don’t know where to start. With 500 color photos, Raw Family Signature Dishes is a friendly, step-by-step guide that gently walks readers through recipes to create amazingly delicious and nutritious meals. Victoria Boutenko and her family are known worldwide as the Raw Family, living on a raw diet and teaching classes since 1994. Throughout the years they have perfected scores of scrumptious recipes with the idea of not only spreading the gospel of the diet’s health benefits, but also making the raw foods lifestyle realistically possible and enjoyable. Mouth-watering rather than medicinal, simple rather than complicated, the recipes presented here include jams, scones, soup, crackers, nut milk, truffles, chocolate cake, and more. Complete, illustrated directions make it simple for both avid raw foodists and novice cooks alike to embrace the diet favored by Demi Moore, Donna Karan, and other celebrities.

$18.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-797-7
176 pages, 8 x 10

On sale July 21, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.

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Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth
By Gerrit Lansing

Heavenly Tree

A senior figure of American letters whose works span more than five decades of creativity, Gerrit Lansing has been an icon of the American cultural underground since the late 1950s and has been a friend and mentor to generations of creative people. Lansing was a close friend and colleague of legendary folklorist and filmmaker Harry Smith and literary giant Charles Olson (who acknowledged Lansing’s influence), among countless others. Poet Robert Kelly has characterized him as “the most learned among us, and the most fun.” Like Emily Dickinson, Lansing has patiently crafted a body of poetic work that includes brilliant and memorable high spots. His work in Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth also represents an integrated whole whose lasting place in the canon of American literature is assured. With themes at once personal and universal, spiritual and esoteric, human and erotic, Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth captures the creative spirit of an unsung master of modern poetry.

$35.00
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-754-0
248 pages, 6 x 9-1/4

On sale July 28, 2009

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On the Origin of Form: Evolution by Self-Organization
By Stuart Pivar

On the Origin of Form

On the Origin of Form presents a new account of evolution and the origin of life based on the premise that the body form of any species is encoded not in the DNA but in the patterned structure of the primordial germ plasm—the universal predecessor of the egg. Two hundred years after Johann von Goethe’s Faustian quest for the Urform, the archetypal design underlying all living form, comes the recent discovery that organic forms are derived from a unique, self-organized, pre-embryonic structure. This explanation of evolution is an alternative to the now widely questioned Neo-Darwinist theory of natural selection of random mutations. This new model is based on known, relatively uncomplicated scientific principles and is easily accessible to the interested layman.

$24.95
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-886-8
208 pages, 8 x 10

On sale July 28, 2009


Imagination & Fire: Dale Pendell

July 21, 2009

Dale PendellOn Wednesday July 22, 2009–at the October Gallery in London–The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness Lecture Series presents:

Imagination And Fire:
New Work and Conversation with Dale Pendell

Dale Pendell is the author of the award-winning Pharmako trilogy on shamanic ethnobotany (Pharmako/Poeia, Pharmako/Dynamis, and Pharmako/Gnosis), Inspired Madness, a book about Burning Man, and Walking with Nobby, a book of conversations with the philosopher Norman O. Brown. Works in progress include The Great Bay, a futuristic novel of a post-collapse society, and Stealing Fire, a new book of poems.

Plant student Dale Pendell established himself as one of the foremost popular exponents of shamanic ethnobotany with the first release of his unprecedented Pharmako trilogy. A noted poet, he was the founding editor of the avant-garde magazine Kuksu and a co-founder of the Primitive Arts Institute and has led workshops on ethnobotany and ethnopoetics for the Naropa Institute and the Omega Institute. Pendell’s performance group, Oracular Madness, most recently appeared at Burning Man. Also an experienced computer scientist, he lives in California’s Sierra foothills with his wife Laura.

This lecture is part of a series to be held at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London on the last Tuesday of each month (excluding August).

Arrive at 6pm for a 6:30pm start. Please reserve your place by emailing rentals@octobergallery.co.uk or calling 44 (0)20 7831 1618.


Obama’s First 100 Days…and Nights

May 20, 2009

Obama Dream

Last week the Obamas hosted their first White House Poetry Jam to celebrate the power of words. Poetry and music warmed the East Room as playwrights, actors, writers, and musicians joined in an appreciation of American arts and culture.

During his campaign, Barack spoke of his Platform In Support Of The Arts, and since his presidency began he has allotted $50 million in stimulus money to the National Endowment for the Arts. Michelle has been deemed an “arts ambassador,” and in a recent speech at the Metropolitan Museum of Art she explained, “The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.” Quite the dynamic duo, artists and art lovers across the country eagerly await what the Obamas will do next.

At a recent poetry workshop, Charles Barasch (Dreams of the Presidents, 2008) asked participants to craft dream poems for Barack Obama. Here’s what they came up with:

Barack Obama’s Dream

At first light
I could feel the beautiful day
Driving hard at the basket
And me going up and over
Back and forth
I was the whole team
Passing to myself
Trying to steal my own ball
The game goes into overtime
With no end in sight

-Jim Finney

Barack Obama’s Dream

I am standing in the middle of a dance floor
where they are playing The Twist.
An older man around sixty warns
a little girl age seven whose hand he holds
not to dance to the music
but she pulls from his grasp
and runs to the other side of the dance floor.
She grabs the hand of a man
in a baseball uniform.
It’s Jackie Robinson.
They do the twist all around
the dance floor and
he suddenly disappears.
The girl asks me to take his place
but I am reluctant to dance.
The dance floor becomes
a cornfield. I run through
a maze of stalks that seem endless
but I find my way free and
come to a clear beautiful stream.
I see a baseball bat at my feet
and pick it up, walk to a batter’s box.
Dick Cheney is the pitcher,
Lincoln catching,
behind him a million umpires.

-Peter Lord

Barack Obama’s Dream

I sit there saying what have I gotten myself into?
Michelle is playing and teaching a bunch of kids,
the dog comes in and pees on my leg.
I wipe it up myself and think again –
what the hell kind of mess have I gotten into?
Joe Biden comes in and tells me everything will be fine.
Nancy Pelosi comes in and says she’ll help.
Cheney comes in and pisses all over the floor.
“This is what it’s like,” he says.

-Barbara Balaban

Barack Obama’s Dream

I’m walking the dog
From the copter to the house.
It’s quiet – no crowds – yet I’m waving
At the trees and the plants.
They wave back – they bow – they tremble.
I worry – do they fear me –
Have I gone too far?
I turn to Michelle – the dog is gone –
The leash is around Michelle.
She smiles – shakes it loose
And flies away – I awake.

-Al Balaban

Barack Obama’s Dream

I am standing on the African steppe. The sun is coming up and warms my bare shoulders. I begin to run. I am running across Kenya at the speed of light. I am focused on the figure whose silhouette glitters with the rising sun. My father is calling me from somewhere, but I cannot see him. I only hear his voice (though I can hardly remember what his voice was like). It’s a chant he’s calling out: CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN CAN. The figure before me raises her arms in victory. She is a woman, a very tall woman, and she is now beckoning me.

-Mary Weldon

Barack Obama’s Dream

I dreamt I was in church with
Michelle, Malia and Sasha
And heard the preacher say from the pulpit
From now on
We will be incorporating features from the Muslim faith
And the women will sit upstairs.

I dreamt I was driving across the country
Wind turbines as far as the eye could see
But there were ghost towns
With signs of the life that was,
The families had migrated to Asia
Where the economy still worked
And people could breathe the air.

I saw signs in the yards
Elect Obama
He will save us from ourselves
And the need to have everything.
“Yes we can,” whispered Hillary. We still can.

-Carol Montgomery

Barack Obama’s Dream

There is a hand over my mouth.
A towel blocks the air from entering.
Then someone drips water
slowly and continuously until I am
drowning with Buchatta in the background.
Harry Potter saves me and I am
suddenly weaving, dribbling around
Putin and Sadaam Hussein,
soaring to dunk over George W.’s open mouth
but the basket fades into a casket
surrounded by hibiscus.
And there is Grandma peaceful
with American flags billowing around her.

-Rachel Steward

Barack Obama’s Dream

Logistics and law
No patience in security and negotiation
Details at the Oval Office
Minutia of staff and public relations
Chafe my neck and fry my patience
My smile hurts

-Teresa Delaney

CLICK HERE to read our other posts about Dreams of the Presidents.




Editor of Belonging Nominated for Northern California Book Award

April 13, 2009

BelongingNiloufar Talebi

Niloufar Talebi, editor of Belonging, was recently nominated for a Northern California Book Award in the Translation category. Belonging is a collection of recent poetry by Iranians living around the world—the book has helped expose readers in the U.S. and abroad to the rich artistic tradition of Iran, something that is unfortunately overshadowed by contemporary politics. Belonging has received some excellent praise since its publication, including a great review on the popular literature blog Three Percent.

Talebi is the founder of The Translation Project, whose mission is to bring contemporary Iranian literature to worldwide audiences in multiple languages and media. North Atlantic would like to congratulate Talebi on this fantastic nomination, and thank everyone who supported this title along the way.

The 28th Annual Northern California Book Awards will be held on April 19th at the San Francisco Main Library in the Koret Auditorium.

Click here for more information on Belonging.
Click here to visit Niloufar Talebi’s website.


Dreams of Our Most Important Leaders

April 8, 2009

US Presidents

“The dreams drift lazily over the harder prose of the footnotes, forming a world saturated with sexual imagery and guilt about slavery and imperialism. Melancholic Presidents wander the White House hallways, grieving over dead children and spouses. Lillian Gish and Marilyn Monroe, who were half ghosts already, rub against the dreams’ surfaces. The poems are a delicious smoke curling around the Presidents; something like the fantasy air around the ad men on TV drama Mad Men, which could’ve easily been Barasch’s title.”
PASTE magazine

Whether you’re a political junkie or an everyday voter, you may want to stop by Housing Works Bookstore on April 26 to meet Charles Barasch, the author of Dreams of the Presidents. The event will begin at 4pm with a poetry reading followed by a Q&A and book signing. Housing Works Bookstore is located at 126 Crosby Street, New York, NY. For more information about this event, visit www.housingworks.org or call 212-334-3324.

The Story Behind the Book:

About twelve years ago, Barasch had a vision: It was “Bobo Brazil,” the first African-American professional wrestling champion, pinning former President Richard Nixon to a mat. And there, staring incredulously from an imagined grandstand was Nixon’s wife Pat. Barasch picked up his pen and wrote a Nixon-inspired poem, rendering it in the protagonist’s own voice. Barasch went on for the next 10 years, creating presidential portraits for each of our country’s leaders. This compilation was published by North Atlantic Books in September 2008 as Dreams of the Presidents: From George Washington to George W. Bush.

CLICK HERE for more information about Dreams of the Presidents.
CLICK HERE for more information about Housing Works Bookstore.
CLICK HERE to read the full book review from PASTE magazine.