Monday

Community Book News

Miksang photo by Maxine Sidran

Osprey Books has re-released William Gilkerson‘s 1963 classic Gilkerson on War under the new title From Rocks to Rockets in re-formatted United Kingdom and North American editions. Available in bookstores and online as of October 2008. Bill’s award-winning novel Pirate’s Passage has been reprinted in several editions in North America and abroad (most recently in Russian), and is currently being made into a 10-part animated film series by the actor Donald Sutherland, whose voice is that of the captain, the book’s storyteller. For more information, visit williamgilkerson.com. Bill is a member of the Shambhala Meditation Centre of the South Shore (Nova Scotia).

Silicon Valley Shambhala Meditation Center (Northern California) member Charlotte Linde has just published her second book, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory (Oxford University Press).  This book looks at how stories work within institutions, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members.  It is based on an anthropological study of how narratives are used in a large insurance company to construct both collective and individual identity.  The author describes it as a stealth dharma book, an attempt describing the development of group ego, and intends it as part of conversation on developing a social abhidharma. If you’d like to purchase the book online in the USA, go here.

Veteran sangha member Ernest Porps of the Boulder Shambhala Center has published his book, Creative Being: Five Steps to Creativity and Problem Solving in Everything You Do, which brings together Ernest’s many years of helping university students find their own creative inspiration. It’s packed with with step-by-step guidance for jumpstarting your own creative endeavors and includes a chapter dedicated to a highly original method for solving everyday problems. Check it out at http://www.trafford.com/05-0099.

Haligonian Meg Federico’s new book, Welcome to the Departure Lounge, was reviewed in the February 21st San Francisco Chronicle – here.

From the review, “When Meg Federico’s 80-year-old mother, Addie, falls while on vacation in Florida, the ambulance paramedic, ‘recoiling from Mother’s ninety-proof breath, scribbled ETOH all over her medical forms. ETOH is medical jargon for ethanol. In Mom’s case, it meant martinis.’ As she was wheeled into the emergency room, Addie, who had been passed out cold, ‘sat bolt upright on the gurney and yelled, ‘”I demand an autopsy!” before passing out again.”

The accident marks the beginning of the last two years of Addie’s life, and in this poignant and funny memoir, Federico recalls what life was like in the Departure Lounge – the nickname Federico gives to her mother and stepfather’s Oldhill, New Jersey home.”

For more on Welcome to the Departure Lounge and its author, check out Meg’s new website, www.megfederico.com

Oryoki and the Oryoki Chant

Lama Tony Duff has published Oryoki and the Oryoki Chant, which, as Lama Tony tells us, “contains a great deal of instruction that came directly from Chogyam Trungpa, and includes extensive writings on the practice of Oryoki and how the view should be applied to it.  That is all backed up with an exceptionally complete commentary on the meaning and practice of the entire liturgy.  This commentary alone should make the book a standard reference for anyone who does the practice of Oryoki.”

Lama Tony also writes, “I live in Kathmandu, where I run the Padma Karpo Translation Committee. I am also a member of the Nalanda Translation Committee, which the Vidyadhara invited me to join after arriving in Boulder from Australia, my homeland.”

Oryoki and the Oryoki Chant includes a very long and detailed explanation of every line of the sutra that prefaces the liturgy.  The book can be purchased from the Padma Karpo Translation Committee website here.

Shambhala community retailers are invited to contact Lama Tony at [email protected] regarding orders.