nprfreshair:

Other Interviews from Fresh Air In 2011 That Might Be Worth Revisiting

1. ‘Death And After In Iraq’: Memoir Of A Mortuary

2. Dan Savage: For Gay Teens, Life ‘Gets Better’

3. ‘Life, Death And Politics’ Treating Chicago’s Uninsured

4. Under The Sea, Sex Is Slimy Business

5.The Human Toll Of The War ‘To End All Wars’

6. Two War Photographers On Their Injuries, Ethics

7. Poet Marie Howe On ‘What The Living Do’ After Loss

8. ‘That’s How’ Christoph Niemann Explains It All

9. You Won’t Feel A Thing: Your Brain On Anesthesia (pictured)

10. The Double Amputee Who Designs Better Limbs

New from the three-time Booker Prize nominee Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance is now available.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.

Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.

420 Characters by Lou Beach is now available!

Alternately surreal, funny, ominous, and lyrical, Lou Beach’s 420 Characters offers an experience as dazzling as any in contemporary fiction. Revealing worlds of meaning in single paragraphs, these crystalline miniature stories began as Facebook status updates, and mark a new turn in an acclaimed artist and illustrator’s career. 420 Characters features original collages by the author.

Click here for more from Lou Beach.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama (yes, THE Dalai Lama) offers his guidance to the world in his new book Beyond Religion, available today!   

Ten years ago, in his best-selling Ethics for a New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere “religion wars,” he outlines a system of secular ethics that gives tolerant respect to religion—those that ground ethics in a belief in God and an afterlife, and those that understand good actions as leading to better states of existence in future lives. And yet, with the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a claim for what he calls a third way. This is a system of secular ethics that transcends religion as a way to recognize our common humanity and so contributes to a global human community based on understanding and mutual respect. Beyond Religion is an essential statement from the Dalai Lama, a blueprint for all those who yearn for a life of spiritual fulfillment as they work for a better world

“Genuine happiness requires peace of mind or a degree of mental composure. When this is present, hardship counts for nothing. With inner strength or mental stability, we can endure all kinds of adversity.”

Be sure to check out the Facebook page and to read an excerpt click here.

Did you hear the rumor? Gossip by Joseph Epstein is now available!

To his successful examinations of some of the most powerful forces in modern life — envy, ambition, snobbery, friendship — the keen observer and critic Joseph Epstein now adds Gossip. No trivial matter, despite its reputation, gossip, he argues, is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed from its old-fashioned best — clever, mocking, a great private pleasure — to a corrosive new-school version, thanks to the reach of the mass media and the Internet. Gossip has invaded and changed for the worse politics and journalism, causing unsubstantiated information to be presented as fact. Contemporary gossip claims to reveal truth, but as Epstein shows, it’s our belief in truth that gossip today threatens to undermine and destroy.

Written in his trademark erudite and witty style, Gossip captures the complexity of this immensely entertaining subject.

The epic, behind-the-scenes story of an astounding gap in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos, The 4% Universe is now available.

In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest—96 percent of the universe—is completely unknown.

 Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this conclusion, and what they’re doing to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. Based on in-depth, on-site reporting and hundreds of interviews—with everyone from Berkeley’s feisty Saul Perlmutter and Johns Hopkins’s meticulous Adam Riess to the quietly revolutionary Vera Rubin—the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe.

 A riveting thriller for fans of historical fiction,The First Assassin is now available!

Winter 1861: the United States teeters on the brink of civil war. In Washington, D.C., Colonel Charles P. Rook is tapped to organize the district’s security and to protect president-elect Abraham Lincoln from the death threats pouring in to the White House. He surrounds the president with bodyguards and fills the city’s rooftops with sharpshooters, diligently investigating the conspiracies being fomented with increasing intensity by Southern secessionists.
 
Yet amidst the chaos and confusion, a foreigner slips unnoticed into the teeming city. Hired by a wealthy Southern planter to eliminate President Lincoln and destroy the Union once and for all, the assassin catches Rook’s attention by cutting down anyone who gets in his way. As the bodies begin to pile up, Rook realizes he is caught in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with a cold-blooded killer who will stop at nothing to complete his mission. Rook’s only hope is Portia, a runaway slave who holds the key to the assassin’s identity—if she can stay alive long enough to deliver it.