One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general and will be of interest to historians and psychologists, as well as to students of the history of religion.

Quoting extensively from Dr. Martin Luther King's sermons and speeches, the author chronicles King's rise from a young minister in Montgomery, Alabama to the world's greatest spokesperson for civil rights.

HISTORICAL NOVEL? OR ONE OF THE MOST ASTOUNDING AUTOBIOGRAPHIES EVER WRITTEN?The memories of a wanderer in the stormy and licentious era of Renaissance Italy...Carola, the illegitimate child of an Italian nobleman, spent her childhood in a castle near Perugia until the day Fortune cast her into the hostile outer-world of 16th-century Italy. As a member of a group of strolling players, Carola was to gather both harsh experience and gentle wisdom from the strong man Bernard, from the harlot Lucia, from the hunchback-jester Petruchio, and from Sofia, who would be burned as a witch. Finally, when she finds her long-sought peace in love, the freedom she has won carries her triumphantly beyond the barrier of death and from her Life As Carola.“Here is an unusual book that shines with fire...that is packed with incident, that is vivid, dramatic and skillfully put together—and yet one that this reviewer finds harder to value correctly than any that has ever fallen into his hands.”—New York Times“During the last twenty years, seven books of mine have been published as historical novels which to me are biographies of previous lives I have known.”—Joan Grant, from her autobiography Far Memory

The original bestseller from the world's most respected astrological authorityEmbark on your cosmic path to self-discovery with this comprehensive guide to the twelve signs of the zodiac.Your sun sign is determined by the day and month of your birth and is the foundation of your horoscope. Taking each of the twelve signs in turn, world famous astrologer Linda Goodman explains the importance of the sun – the most powerful of all stellar bodies. She describes the characteristics of each sign and how these can be used to really get to know the men, women, children, bosses and employees in your life. This newfound knowledge allows us to feel closer to one another and to understand that, as Goodman says, ‘Not all Capricorns are meek, not all Leos are outwardly domineering and not all Virgos are virgins.’ Learn all this and much, much more from the world-famous astrologer who has helped millions divine their way to success, happiness and love by studying the sun signs.Before publication of Sun Signs in 1968, astrology as we know it had a very limited following in the United States and around the world. With this book, Linda Goodman changed that forever, bringing metaphysical consciousness to millions of readers around the world for the first time. Newspapers began running astrology columns, and Goodman herself contributed to these in the larger mass circulation women's magazines. An increasing number of people knew their sign and how to interpret the signs of others, introducing the study of astrological tendencies as we now know it.

One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood. Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery. In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring. For even as he recounts his transformation, McCall compels us to recognize that racism is as pervasive in the newsroom as it is in the inner city, where it condemns so many black men to prison, to dead-end jobs, or to violent deaths. At once an indictment and an elegy, Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994. Now, some two decades later, it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

"THE papers here collected are written solely for members of the Masonic Order, constituted under the United Grand Lodge of England. (...) They have been written with a view to promoting the deeper understanding of the meaning of Masonry"

A literary classic that wasn't recognized for its merits until decades after its publication, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick tells the tale of a whaling ship and its crew, who are carried progressively further out to sea by the fiery Captain Ahab. Obsessed with killing the massive whale, which had previously bitten off Ahab's leg, the seasoned seafarer steers his ship to confront the creature, while the rest of the shipmates, including the young narrator, Ishmael, and the harpoon expert, Queequeg, must contend with their increasingly dire journey. The book invariably lands on any short list of the greatest American novels.

At the age of 11, Kody Scott was initiated into the L.A. gang the Crips. He'd just done battle with the enemy, pumping eight blasts from a sawn-off shotgun into a group of rival gang members. From then on, Kody channeled everything into gang life - earning the gang name of Monster. Written from his prison cell, this autobiography is an account of the violent life of Monster Kody Scott.

Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in the English colonies, Eileen Southern weaves a fascinating narrative of intense musical activity, which has not only played a vital role in the lives of black Americans but has also deeply influenced music performance in the United States and many other parts of the world. Dr. Southern fully chronicles the singers, instrumentalists, and composers who created this rich body of music and skillfully describes the genres and styles that characterize it from its earliest manifestations among a people in slavery to the rap beat of the late twentieth century. Along the way, she covers numerous topics - such as Colonial-Era music, Revolutionary War performers, church music, minstrelsy, ragtime, swing, concert music, soul, pop, and opera - bringing them to life and placing them in their historical and cultural contexts.

"Mysticism" is one of most celebrated books on the subject. The spirit of the book is romantic, engaged, and theoretical rather than historical or scientific. Underhill has little use for theoretical explanations and the traditional religious experience, formal classifications or analysis. She dismisses William James' pioneering study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and his "four marks of the mystic state" (ineffability, noetic quality, transcience, and passivity). Excerpt: "All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next."

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.

In Nature, Man and Woman, philosopher Alan Watts reexamines humanity’s place in the natural world—and the relation between body and spirit—in the light of Chinese Taoism. Western thought and culture have coalesced around a series of constructed ideas—that human beings stand separate from a nature that must be controlled; that the mind is somehow superior to the body; that all sexuality entails a seduction—that in some way underlie our exploitation of the earth, our distrust of emotion, and our loneliness and reluctance to love. Here, Watts fundamentally challenges these assumptions, drawing on the precepts of Taoism to present an alternative vision of man and the universe—one in which the distinctions between self and other, spirit and matter give way to a more holistic way of seeing.

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell’s 1984 takes on new life in this edition. “Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be. Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece, “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.

Here, in one of his most popular of his more than thirty books, Thomas Merton provides further meditations on the spiritual life in sixteen thoughtful essays, beginning with his classic treatise "Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away." This sequel to Seeds of Contemplation provides fresh insight into Merton's favorite topics of silence and solitude, while also underscoring the importance of community and the deep connectedness to others that is the inevitable basis of the spiritual life--whether one lives in solitude or in the midst of a crowd.

Nostradamus is still seen in the late 20th century as perhaps the most successful of all history's prophets. His bizarre writings have been interpreted during the last four centuries in many different ways. The verses or "quatrains", written in old French, contain a number of key words which have never been quite understood until now. Words such as "Mabus" and "Hieron" have baffled commentators, who have presumed that they refer to events in our future. Peter Lorie, in this new volume of predictions for the next two decades, has successfully provided a completely new insight into the prophet's methods, basing them on events contemporary to Nostradamus' lifetime. The solutions that emerge cast a completely fresh light on the predictions and give us a powerful and positive view of our near and more distant future. In addition, with the help of Dr. Liz Greene, a worldrenowned astrologer and Jungian psychoanalyst, the book contains a complete astrological analysis of the years from 1996 to 2016, using national birth charts for the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other major countries around the world. Although working as a clairvoyant and "seer" of his future, Nostradamus also used the celestial science of astrology to confirm his work, and would have access to similar astrological information that is now weaved into this original and penetrating study of the future. The result is a convincing partnership between magic and science which reveals, year by year, the political and social development of America, Europe, The Baltic States, Japan, and other parts of the world scene, and examines the grand schemes of war, government, power, natural disaster, and other importantevents.

One of the 20th century's enduring works, "One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize- winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendi a family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendi a family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel Garci a Ma rquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master. Alternately reverential and comical, "One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ. 1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955 was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man.

From home remedies for poison ivy, toothaches and sunburn to vitamin therapy for reducing the risk of cancer and heart disease, here is the latest information about health and natural healing incorporated into and easy-to-use encyclopedia. First time in paperback.

We are in the midst of a powerful psychedelic renaissance. After four decades of hibernation, the promise of the psychoactive '60s--that deeper self-awareness, achieved through reality-bending substances and practices, will lead to greater external harmony--is again gaining a major following. The signs are everywhere, from the influence of today's preeminent psychedelic thinker Daniel Pinchbeck, to the renewed interest in the legacy of Terence McKenna, and to the upsurge of collective, inclusive (and overtly tripped-out) cultural phenomena like the spectacle of Burning Man. The Psychedelic Experience, created in the movement's early years by the prophetic shaman-professors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), is a foundational text that serves as a model and a guide for all subsequent mind-expanding inquiries. In this wholly unique book, the authors provide an interpretation of an ancient sacred manuscript, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from a psychedelic perspective. This volume describes their discoveries in broadening spiritual consciousness through a combination of Tibetan meditation techniques and psychotropic substances. As sacred as the text it reflects, The Psychedelic Experience is a guidebook to the wilderness of mind and an indispensable resource from the founding fathers of psychedelia. This edition includes an all-new introduction by Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and Breaking Open the Head. "It is a book for the living as well as for the dying." --Lama Govinda

Am I a psychic? How can I develop my own psychic abilities? What is a clairvoyant? Are angels real? How do people see auras? The Psychic Realm is a handbook to help in answering these and other questions people may have about the paranormal. This book covers a wide range of topics such as reiki, spirit guides, soul mates, dreams and dream symbols, crystals, ghosts, how to contact angels, and contains a dictionary of terms used for quick reference.

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only was it a pioneering work by an African-American playwright - Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, one that was resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. In her portrait of an embattled Chicago family, Hansberry anticipated issues that range from generational clashes to the civil rights and women's movements. She also posed the essential questions - about identity, justice and moral responsibility - at the heart of these great struggles. The result is a work that captivated audiences from every walk of life and has become a classic of American letters.